A Hoax on America's Hoaxter in Chief

Remember the Montreal DJs who fooled Sarah Palin into believing she had French president Nicholas Sarkozy on the line? It turns out they pulled the very same stunt a year earlier on George w. Bush.

The CKOI radio duo, who call themselves the "Masked Righters of Wrong," managed to bluff their way into getting the number for the direct line to Bush in the White House situation room in 2007. They agreed not to release the tape of their stunt until after the change of administrations.

Radio CKOI will be airing the tape tomorrow, April Fool's Day

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/canadian-djs-duped-bush-white-house-20090401-9imk.html

What Do the Tories Know That We Don't? Ask Mulroney

Is the Pope Catholic? Is Brian Mulroney a Tory? Yes to the first, depends who you ask to the second.

The Conservative Television Network reports there's some disagreement between Conservative 'sources' and Mulroney as to whether Lyin' Brian is still a Tory.

Senior Conservatives contacted select reporters Tuesday to tell them Mulroney had effectively torn up his party card.

"I can confirm he is no longer a member," said one Conservative source.

Mulroney briskly fired off an unequivocal statement through his public relations team.
"I remain a member of the Conservative Party and I will remain so until the day I die," Mulroney said.

The bizarre dispute over Mulroney's party membership is a sign of just how bilious the relationship between the Harper government and Mulroney has become.

Makes you wonder whether the Harpies have sized up what's coming at the Oliphant inquiry and figure it'd be a good idea to try to distance the CPC from the former Tory PM.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090331/mulroney_tories_090331/20090331?hub=TopStories

Air Canada Crashing Again?

It couldn't happen to a more deserving airline. Air Canada is said to be on the verge of seeking bankruptcy protection for the second time in six years.

The problem this time is the usual - recession, falling bookings, pension deficits and, of course, being trounced at the hands of our very own, Western airline - WestJet.

Take a WestJet flight some time and you'll find it filled with travellers who've written off Air Canada long ago. What once was known as the People's Airline has alienated a lot of its customer base over the past decade.

In my former practice I wound up acting for a lot of pilots, some from Air Canada and many others from names now just memories - WardAir, Canadian Pacific Airlines, Pacific Western Airlines, Canadian Airlines International. Through a host of bad planning and management, they were all swallowed up, in turn, until what remained was incorporated into the latter day Air Canada, itself a shabby vestige of what it had once been.

To my thinking, the hapless thing we know as today's Air Canada is simply the end result of Mulroney's disastrous plan to privatize Air Canada and deregulate Canada's airlines. Prior to Mulroney Canada's two flag carriers were well regulated. Each was given priority on specific regions and high-profit routes. In exchange for that, each was also obligated to provide service to less-profitable, secondary airports which did a lot to open up this country from the 50's through the 70's.

Once Mulroney deregulated the airlines, Canadian Pacific and Air Canada went after the high-profit routes like two dogs after the same steak. For example, both airlines were operating densely packed schedules of nearly-empty airplanes between Vancouver and Toronto every day. Each wanted domination over the other on that route and each was prepared to bleed itself in the process. Seat-mile revenues plummeted, leaving both airlines mortally weak to the inevitable fluctuations in our economy.

At the end, Canadian Pacific (now renamed Canadian Airlines International) was the closest to financial death when it made a bid to save itself by attempting to take over Air Canada. After a lot of vicious maneuvering, Canadian Airlines International was itself taken over by Air Canada but what emerged was not the Air Canada of the 70's. It never really recovered.

In the years since it first resorted to bankruptcy protection, Air Canada has tried - and failed - to compete with the newcomer, WestJet. Now it appears to be back on the ropes, again.

Shattering Delusions of Afghan Progress

When the dwindling ranks of cheerleaders for the Afghan occupation speak out, it's generally to raise all the progress on women's rights. Right.

As The Guardian points out, with the stroke of his presidential pen, Hamid Karzai has consigned Afghan women back to the Dark Ages:

Hamid Karzai has been accused of trying to win votes in Afghanistan's presidential election by backing a law the UN says legalises rape within marriage and bans wives from stepping outside their homes without their husbands' permission.

The Afghan president signed the law earlier this month, despite condemnation by human rights activists and some MPs that it flouts the constitution's equal rights provisions.

A briefing document prepared by the United Nations Development Fund for Women also warns that the law grants custody of children to fathers and grandfathers only.

Senator Humaira Namati, a member of the upper house of the Afghan parliament, said the law was "worse than during the Taliban". "Anyone who spoke out was accused of being against Islam," she said.

Read more here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/31/hamid-karzai-afghanistan-law

When Banks Won't Foreclose

You know that Lewis Carrol has been writing your economic rules when lenders can't be bothered to foreclose on delinquent mortgages. They hold the mortgage, the borrower is in default, the property is theirs for the taking - but they just walk away.

Two problems. A collapse in housing prices. A considerable surplus in housing stocks. The two combine and, at the very bottom, you have houses that are worth so little in today's economy that it's not worth even foreclosing on them. It's cheaper to just walk away. From The New York Times:

City officials and housing advocates here [South Bend, Indiana] and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from legal fees to maintenance — exceeds the diminishing value of the real estate.
The so-called bank walkaways rarely mean relief for the property owners, caught unaware months after the fact, and often mean additional financial burdens and bureaucratic headaches. Technically, they still owe on the mortgage, but as a practicality, rarely would a mortgage holder receive any more payments on the loan. The way mortgages are bundled and resold, it can be enormously time-consuming just trying to determine what company holds the loan on a property thought to be in foreclosure.

In Ms. [Mercy] James’s case, the company that was most recently servicing her loan is now defunct. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy and dissolved. And the original bank that sold her the loan said it could not find a record of it.

In a city like Detroit, with the automakers on the ropes, and layoffs in the tens of thousands rippling through the economy, bottom-end houses have been selling for less than $10,000. It's a contagious problem. When property prices begin to be set by delinquent mortgagors, homeowners who keep their mortgages in good standing see their equity go into the negative column which can kill their ability to refinance when the mortgage term ends. In that way, the bad mortgage debt can trigger the default in an otherwise good mortgage debt.

America's surplus housing stocks remains an unaddressed problem. With subprime mortgages and "liar loans" fueling Bush's ridiculous "Ownership Society" a lot of people whose income wasn't adequate for home ownership did in fact acquire houses. It moved on right up the chain. People who ought to have had modest houses instead got finer houses than their incomes could support. Others got several houses, sometimes on "interest only" mortgages, hoping that soaring house prices would let them rake in enough profits to let them wind up with one clear-title dream home and a fat bank account to boot. Thus the housing sector, construction and finance, became the engine of America's economy. It became, as Paul Krugman noted years earlier, a fictional land of wealth based on people selling their homes to each other.

Like so many of his initiatives, Bush's Ownership Society proved to be a toxic blessing, an 8-year binge that cemented America's decline. I'd bet that, twenty years from now, the Ownership Society will trump the War on Terror as the greatest scam Bush/Cheney inflicted on their countrymen.

And so America finds itself with far more houses than eligible homeowners. CBC's Neil MacDonald did a feature piece recently that trolled through what were just a year or two back burgeoning Florida subdivisions where most of the homes now sit empty, abandoned. They've been so neglected for so long that these really nice little houses are now being ravaged by the elements as once verdant neighbourhoods come to resemble 21st century ghost towns.

Will this end? Sure, of course it will. What's unsettling everyone today is that nobody knows where the bottom lies and that uncertainty is a plague of its own. Prices will plummet to levels considerably lower than their natural floor and then, as they begin to firm up, confidence will return along with suitable buyers. Maybe there'll even be another bubble but I doubt it. Rash lenders have taken a huge, yet well-deserved hit and the scars will last for decades at least.

America's Pendulum Slowly Swings Back

A small, but encouraging development. A Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that, despite the Repugnicant's best efforts, an overwhelming majority of Americans isn't buying the idea that their new president is responsible for their country's economic meltdown.

Despite the furious efforts of the Repugs in Congress and their shills at FOX (Hannity) and elsewhere (Slimebot) to tag Obama with the Bush era mess, Americans by a massive majority put the blame where it belongs - on their financial industry.

Now anyone who reads this blog would think that much was obvious but don't forget this is a citizenry that was totally taken in by an emperor with no pants for many years; a people that believed their houses were infinite ATMs; a nation of borrowers who have truly acted as though they alone could defy gravity. When you've been that far out on the branch for that long, getting back to the centre is a long climb down.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/30/AR2009033003415.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Today's Dumbest Newspaper in Canada

And the prize goes to...

The Globe & Mail

which is today's Dumbest Newspaper in Canada for this headline: "Afghanistan still dangerous, PM says."

Really, The Globe needs Harper to inform the Canadian people that Afghanistan is still dangerous? To cinch the award, the G&M features an utterly vapid editorial on the meltdown by Marcus Gee in the business section.

Fix It Again Tony - FIAT Returns?

Chrysler is headed for a shotgun wedding - to FIAT, Italy's own, often wobbly, auto maker.

To give you an idea of what FIAT has gone through, here's a look at what was happening in 2002. From Business Week:

...Fiat's financial problems are hardly over. Many of them come from Fiat Auto--and those may soon belong to General Motors Corp. (GM ) GM bought 20% of Fiat Auto in 2000 for $2.4 billion and granted Fiat a put option--the right to sell GM the rest--as of January, 2004. Now GM faces a big dilemma. It's short of cash, so a big acquisition would be a serious burden. But if GM waits until 2004, it could be stuck with an even bigger lemon.

Fiat Auto has been careening downhill since GM bought its stake. It lost $1.3 billion in 2001 and is expected to lose another $1 billion this year. Management forecasts breaking even in 2003 and making a slight profit in 2004. But analysts say it'll take three years and $3 billion to $5 billion to reverse its decline.

Will Fiat sell now or later? Much depends on how much GM would pay. Investment bankers say Fiat Auto would be worth nothing if a buyer had to take on its about $1.7 billion of debt. The put terms let Fiat and GM each name bankers to negotiate a "fair market price." But time isn't on Fiat's side. "Things will only get worse for Fiat," says a board member.

Chrysler has had a tortured past with European automakers beginning with Renault in the 80's and Mercedes in the 90's. Just last year there were rumours that Chrysler owner, Cerebrus Management, would sell the US automaker to Renault. Now Mercedes is out, Renault is out, so it's FIAT.

Obama has given Cerebrus just 30-days to ink its "partnership" deal with FIAT. That pretty much gives FIAT the whip hand in dealing with the Americans.

General Motors is no better off. The White House has given what once was the very backbone of American manufacturing just 60-days to come up with a workable restructuring plan or there'll be no more federal support.

In a curious move to keep the automakers and their dealers from total collapse, there's a plan in the works whereby Washington could take over warranty obligations to purchasers of GM and Chrysler vehicles. No word yet on whether Ottawa will follow suit.

It seems inconceivable that the Big Three could turn into One Plus. What would FIAT do with Chrysler other than use it to make another flop attempt at entering the North American market? What of Windsor and Brampton and Oakville? What of every small town where the Ford, Chrysler and Chevy dealers have held sway for the better part of a century? What of Ontario?

British Police Monitoring Muslim Kids

I'm not sure how I feel about this. The Guardian reports that a British police programme has identified 180 children in Britain as potential Islamist terrorists.

The Channel project, a pilot scheme established in April 2007 and run by six police forces, provides parents, teachers and youth workers with training to recognise the warning signs of "grooming" by radicals and a mechanism to report concerns over a child, or group of children, to the police. A panel of community leaders then decides the best course of action, in the most serious cases referring them to social services.

Keen to assuage fears the scheme targets Muslim children unfairly, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) last night said the aim was to steer vulnerable children away from radicalism before it was too late.

I suppose it makes sense but isn't there someone other than the police force that can handle this? There's just something about cops spying on kids that is worrying.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/28/children-extremist-terrorism-uk-polic

Back on Track

Barack Obama has a problem. His White House is leaking like a sieve. The upside to it is that it appears the cowboy days of Shrub Bush are history and the executive branch is back to rational decision-making.

The New York Times identified no less than half a dozen officials who spoke to the paper about Obama's decision on Afghanistan. Naturally they all spoke on condition of anonymity.

The debate over the past few weeks offered a glimpse into how Mr. Obama makes decisions. In this case, he chose a compromise between his political and military advisers that some critics say includes some strategic holes, such as a reliance on the same sort of vague guidelines that proved difficult to carry out in Iraq. It also offers insight into the role of Mr. Biden and other members of a foreign policy team that includes many powerful figures vying for Mr. Obama’s attention.

In the end the plan is a compromise that reflected all of the strains of the discussion among his advisers, one that is markedly different, though perhaps no less difficult, from the goals his predecessor set for the region. In speaking of Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush spoke of lofty goals that included building nations that could stand as models of democracy in the Muslim world.

...During the debate, the senior administration officials said, Mr. Biden sought to put strict parameters on the size of the additional force deployed to Afghanistan and to ensure there was a specific mission for them. Mr. Biden also cast the debate in terms of what was achievable in Mr. Obama’s first term, administration officials said.

Mr. Biden, White House officials said, was heavily influenced by the trip he took to Afghanistan and Pakistan just before the inauguration in January. He observed to Mr. Obama that if you asked 10 people on the ground what American objectives were, he would get 10 different answers. That observation, aides said, carried weight with Mr. Obama and helped to lead to his decision to narrow the American goal in Afghanistan.

Contrast this with former State Secretary Colin Powell's revelation that he only learned about Bush's decision to invade Iraq after it had already been taken. And look how well that turned out.

I'm still curious whether the Times' sources were really telling tales out of school or was it intended they would get the message out?

Spector's Path to Acquittal

Aging pop record producer Phil Spector won't be convicted of murder in this, his second trial on the charge. Defence counsel have already got the keys to the jailhouse door.

If Spector is convicted, so will a couple of his jurors. The difference is that Spector's conviction would be set aside but the jurors won't be so lucky.

In a move that argues for sequestration of juries, particularly on major cases, the Spector jury has been given a four-day break, not scheduled to return to deliberations until Wednesday. The judge naturally instructed them about discussing the case, reading newspapers, surfing the web and so on to ensure their judgment wasn't tainted.

Spector's lawyers were on that like white on rice. According to a bizarre web site, crimefilenews.com, the defence team have been electronically monitoring the jurors and have already detected jury web surfing and e-mailing.

Here's the predicament. If the jury does convict, Spector's counsel present their evidence that the jury has been tainted and demand a mistrial. In that case, Spector likely gets to walk while the offending jurors have to answer to the judge for sabotaging a four-month long case. In other words, some of the jurors now have a vested interest in holding out against conviction.

If the jury does acquit Spector, the defence surveillance evidence won't surface and and defendant and the jurors will all simply go home.

I think the judge, Larry Paul Fidler already has an enormous problem on his hands. The jury is already tainted. The story is out. He can't ignore it. Unless it's a complete fabrication by a blogger with an overactive imagination the trial seems to be ruined, four months of time, effort and enormous expense down the drain.

To keep the situation in perspective, Fidler gave the jury the four-day break only after they had announced they couldn't agree on a verdict. He wanted to avoid a second, hung jury and so gave them some time to mull it all over before returning to deliberations. I think Fidler knew that, if he kept the jury sequestered, it was over anyway. He could see the writing on the wall and it read "hung jury."

Two hung juries, no eyewitness evidence, somewhat ambiguous and inconclusive forensic evidence, and a bucket full of circumstantial evidence as old as the platinum records adorning Spector's walls - not a confidence builder for a prosecutor. If Spector gets out of this bind that might be the end of the Lana Clarkson murder mystery.

Russia's Arctic Iron Curtain

Moscow is said to expect the Arctic to become its main source of oil and gas by 2020 and it's moving to create an Arctic military force to protect its interests. From BBC News:

In order to protect its assets, Moscow says one of its main goals will be the establishment of troops "capable of ensuring military security" in the region.

With climate change opening up the possibility of making drilling viable in previously inaccessible areas, the Arctic has gained in strategic importance for Russia, says the BBC's James Rodgers in Moscow.

Given the fragile nature of the Arctic ecology, the resource rampage by Russia and others should manage to kill off most of it in short order. To date only Norway has acknowledged the environmental threats from Arctic resource extraction. With 90-billion barrels of oil said to be found in the region, exploitation and its associated problems are probably a foregone conclusion.

Think of Ice Station Zebra only without the ice.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7967973.stm

Business Leaders Get It - It's Much More Than Global Warming

The fundamental weakness in many approaches to global warming is that it's taken in isolation. Yes, we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, drastically cut them. But we need a holistic approach to a whole series of looming problems of which global warming is but one.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development wants water, energy and climate change issues directly linked.

"Water is everybody's business. It is used to generate energy, and energy is used to provide water. Climate change will affect the use and availability of both. It is important that we get the policies right," said Björn Stigson, the organization's president.

"The World Water Forum in Istanbul has done a lot to focus attention on water, energy and climate change. But there is still a significant gap in addressing all three together at a global level. We must link them in the climate negotiations to have any real hope of finding a solution."

David Frum and Disaster Environmentalism

Spurned by the droolers who make up the base of the Repugnican Party, Frump takes a swipe at environmentalism in today's National Toast:

If conservatives can learn to live with a tax on coal, then environmentalists can learn to live with nuclear power.

Brilliant Davy boy, brilliant. Now run along to the American Enterprise Institute. Donuts and pop for everyone in the boardroom!

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03/27/david-frum-the-shock-doctrine-disaster-environmentalism-in-action.aspx

Women, Sure - But Catholics?

Britain's Royals have fallen on hard times. It's not just the salary, the benefits are lousy too. And do you have any idea how much those hats and handbags weigh? And all those dreadful cucumber sandwiches!

In order to attract new candidates to the royalty, British MPs are debating amendments to the 1701 Act of Settlement that establishes the rules of succession. Okay, brace yourselves.

First up - giving women in the Royal Family equal succession rights. You knew that was bound to happen sooner or later didn't you.

But the really controversial part is a proposal to allow heirs to the throne to actually marry Roman Catholics! Imagine that, if you can. Catholics in the Royal Family! What's next - Mustapha, Duke of Norfolk? Once you let those Catholics in, believe me there'll be no end to it.

The proposed changes would catapult the Queen's only daughter, Princess Anne from 10th to an ever-so-close 4th place in line of succession. A brake failure here and a tumble down a palace staircase there and, before you know it, she could be sitting in the Big Chair.

Don't expect anything to happen overnight. The proposed changes are raised in a private members bill.

A Pope? Distorting Science? Don't Give Me That Or I'll Stone Your Ass Back to The Dark Ages

Those total, know-nothings at the British medical journal (yeah, right - just look at the state of their teeth!), The Lancet are claiming that God's own living, breathing Saint is fudging the truth about condoms and HIV/AIDS.

Damn, isn't there a research or publication grant we can scutttle to make these people shut up? From BBC News:

It said the Pope's recent comments that condoms exacerbated the problem of HIV/Aids were wildly inaccurate and could have devastating consequences.

The Pope had said the "cruel epidemic" should be tackled through abstinence and fidelity rather than condom use.

Correspondents say the attack from the Lancet was unprecedentedly virulent.

Excuse me, but I thought that HIV/AIDS had "unprecedently virulent" trademark protected. Is it really just me?

It's Not Just the Long Gun Registry Any Longer

As a close personal friend and confidante of RCMP Commissioner Bill Elliott, I hear all sorts of things months before it reaches you plebs. Here's one of them.

The RCMP is asking the Justice Minister, the Security Minister, the Minister of Small Wastebaskets and the Prime Minister to create a new weapons registry - the Lethal Stapler Registry (or "LSR").

Across the country, but especially at airports and especially at British Columbia airports and especially at Lower Mainland, British Columbia airports, RCMP officers are reporting an alarming increase in surprise stapler attacks. It's getting so bad that officers are experiencing nightmares in which middle-aged dudes who don't speak English attack; folding, mutilating and stapling them before they can reach their Tasers.

Mental health professionals consulted by RCMP headquarters have concluded the stapler attacks are becoming so widespread and so severe that officers in the field are suffering PTSD and random psychotic events whenever they pass by a stationery store. They're recommending the creation of a Stapler Registry where users can be screened to ensure they represent no threat to police or other demented bastards.

Prime Minister Stephano Harpo says his government will act, although the cost of the new registry could mean repealing the ban on concealed handguns.

Courage friends, courage.

Phil Spector In Jury's Hands - Again

The five month long retrial of legendary record producer Phil Spector has gone to the jury. 69-year old Spector was charged with murder in the shooting death of would-be actress Lana Clarkson at his Los Angeles home six years ago.

Spector claims Clarkson shot herself. The prosecution plainly believes otherwise. The defendant has a long history of carrying hand guns and pulling them on people, including several rock stars who were working with him.

If convicted of second-degree murder, Spector faces a minimum prison sentence of 18-years. If the jury finds him guilty of involuntary manslaughter he faces two to four years in prison. If the jury acquits he'll be the luckiest defendant in an LA courtroom since O.J. Simpson. Either way, he ought to get at least a couple of years for outrageously bad hair.

The first trial ended in a hung jury.

We're In For a Wild Ride

TD Bank economist Don Drummond told the Commons finance committee that the world is going to have a dandy hangover from the bailout/recovery spending binge now underway.

Drummond figures all those trillions of dollars will spark a wave of inflation that will have to be beaten down the old fashioned way - by raising interest rates. The good news from the former Finance Department official is that we're on track for a recovery in 2010. The bad news is that it's going to be a long and slow road back to what we understand as prosperity.

There's going to be an enormous amount of debt to get squared away and it will be in the course of dealing with it that we'll confront just what we did with that money, whether we got much value out of it.

My greatest criticism of the Harper-Ignatieff budget is its near total lack of vision. Yes it was important for the government to get billions of dollars flowing through the economy. Yes the budget seems to do that. But what's just as important is how that money is used, what we get for it.

The government that's just added those billions to our tax bills had a choice to either control where the money went, that is to spend the money itself, or it could simply give it away and lose control of it. The government chose to simply send cash-stuffed envelopes - to some. Some will get a hundred bucks or two to blow at WalMart. Some will get a subsidy to help put a deck on the cottage. Some cities and provinces will get money for infrastructure projects that were already scheduled on the books.

If I was going to build a new deck on the cottage anyway, the government "stimulus" is really just a give away. It didn't stimulate anything. If my city was going to pave some streets anyway, there's a handout without an associated stimulus. In those cases, the government is pledging our good credit and our kids' to borrow money to dole out to the lucky few for essentially nothing. There's no stimulus to that and, worse, there's probably little to no return either.

The government could have spent that money on brand, new projects, legitimate stimulus projects atop everything else that was already on the books. It could have designated projects that would spread the benefit equitably across the country. It could have identified programmes that would enhance our society, make it greener, more effective - thing that would have produced a return to the taxpayers for years to come. Hint - that deck on the cottage doesn't return a damned thing.

Obama's people knew what government spending was supposed to look like. Ours didn't have a clue - not the government of Stephen Harper nor the Opposition leader who supported the wastrel budget. In the result, we're not going to get the value out of all that gigantic debt that we should have. We're not going to get the basic stimulus value, the immediate objective, because a lot of this money won't wind up creating "new" activity. And we're not going to get the economic return that would offset the pain we'll all feel when we have to begin paying this off. There won't be a clean energy programme; or a modern, efficient rail system; or an electricity grid for the 21st Century. All those things that would have represented genuine investments (i.e. with tangible returns) were passed over when the prime minister and opposition leader signed off on this budget.

I'll bet it won't be a year before we wake up and realize just how badly our legislators on both sides of the House bungled this thing, how they let down Canada and her people. It's going to be a wild ride indeed, much wilder than it needed to be.

Survey - When Will Harper Be Deposed and Who Will Do It?

It's hard to imagine Harper surviving yet another minority election - either way. He must be nearing the end of his rope. Either he delivers a majority Conservative government or he's booted out the back door.

I'm sure the knives are coming out. Harper's not a very likeable guy. His sort always makes more enemies than friends.

So, weigh in. Who's going to do the dirty deed? When? Will Harper flee Ottawa on his own or will he be driven out? Will the CPC remain Reform dominated or will that run its course with Harper's fall?

Oh, and by the way. Does anybody know why Bill McKnight will be giving evidence when the Oliphant inquiry into Mulroney begins on Monday?

Pakistan's Perfidy

American government officials claim that officials of Pakistan's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency are still aiding the Taliban in planning strikes in Afghanistan. From The New York Times:


The support consists of money, military supplies and strategic planning guidance to Taliban commanders who are gearing up to confront the international force in Afghanistan that will soon include some 17,000 American reinforcements.

Support for the Taliban, as well as other militant groups, is coordinated by operatives inside the shadowy S Wing of Pakistan’s spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Service Intelligence, the officials said. There is even evidence that ISI operatives meet regularly with Taliban commanders to discuss whether to intensify or scale back violence before the Afghan elections.


If these accounts are true, then we're getting precisely nowhere in Afghanistan and the Pakistani military intelligence service has decided to throw in with the insurgency on that assumption.


Even Musharraf wasn't able to rein in the ISI and, with the civilian government in Islamabad teetering on collapse, it plainly can't either.


Fight with the Canadian Forces - fight the insurgency, fight the corrupt central government, fight the narcotics barons, fight the warlords and, for good measure, fight the Pakistani military. Can you see where this is going?

Out of Jobs, Out of Money, Out of Ideas

The Harper stimulus budget aimed to create a pool of jobs to cushion jobs lost to the recession. At the time, I figured it'd take until February for layoffs to exceed Flaherty's good news estimate. I might have been pessimistic, being partisan and all, but if I was out, it was only by one month.

Parliamentary budget officer Ken Page says Canada has already shed as many jobs as Flaherty promised to create in his January estimates and there's no bottom in sight. From Bloomberg Press:

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty on Jan. 27 predicted deficits of C$33.7 billion for the 2009-2010 fiscal year and C$29.8 billion for 2010-2011. Page said those figures will instead be about C$38 billion and C$35 billion for the next two years, respectively. Lower tax revenue will lead the wider shortfalls, he said.

“Recent economic data and the Parliamentary Budget Office’s updated survey of private sector forecasters suggest a further significant deterioration in the outlook for the Canadian economy relative to budget 2009 fiscal planning assumptions,” Page said.

Harper and Flaherty are causing Canada and the Canadian people no end of pain by constantly underestimating the fiscal mess we're facing. They keep planning and budgeting for a brush fire when we're being consumed by a forest fire.

In a word, they're "incompetent." The best thing they have going for them is a complacent, timid Official Opposition headed by a man of very limited political depth and unable to communicate any alternate vision when that's what Canadians really need to hear.

US Steelmakers Push for Carbon Taxes on Steelmakers

Sure that sounds implausible until you find out that US steelmakers are demanding carbon taxes on imports from Chinese steelmakers. From Reuters:

"Chinese steelmakers enjoy an unfair advantage in global trade due to the lack of enforcement of exceptionally weak pollution standards," Scott Paul, the executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, told reporters in a teleconference.

Paul said Chinese steelmaking emits two to three times as much carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as U.S. industry does. Also, U.S. steel production has fallen during the global recession, while China's has held mostly steady.

What the American firms are demanding isn't merely justifiable, it's essential. Global warming is a global issue and there's absolutely no excuse for China not to be pumping a good measure of its export-driven wealth into meeting the same standards we expect of domestic producers. Carbon tariffs deliver a powerful incentive to an environmental leveling of the international playing field.

http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/39483

Too Big To Let Die, Too Big To Let Live

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi with Rachel Maddow on why America should no longer tolerate companies "too big to let fail."

Catholics Recoil at Obama Speech to Notre Dame

The Kid-Diddler Brigade is outraged that Barack Obama has been invited to speak at Notre Dame university's commencement ceremonies next month. Seems to have something to do with Obama's decision to take America out of Dark Age fundamentalism by lifting bans on stem cell research in the United States. From The Guardian:

Nearly 90,000 people have signed a petition demanding that Notre Dame University, in Indiana, should withdraw its invitation to the president and rescind its decision to award him an honorary degree.

Bishop John D'Arcy, of the diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, has promised to boycott the ceremony on 17 May. He said the decision to invite Obama was "shocking".

He said: "While claiming to separate politics from science, he has in fact separated science from ethics and has brought the American government, for the first time in history, into supporting direct destruction of innocent human life.

Conservative Catholics in the blogosphere have been much more vituperative, referring to the president as a fanatic and "Barack Aborter". Anti-abortion groups have promised to demonstrate at the university during the president's visit, including displaying graphic images of aborted foetuses to those attending the ceremony.

Much Too Dumb for Prime Time

Bobby Jindal is riding to the rescue of - Rush Limbaugh!

Slimebot sparked a controversy when he first told his radio audience that he wanted President Barack Obama to fail. The remark was widely taken as unpatriotic, anti-American. It seemed to coalesce Limbaugh's supporters and opponents alike.

But Limbaugh may be the most popular Republican in the states right now. The Dems have done everything they can to raise Lardo's prominence. The Louisiana governor, however, hasn't been faring as well. The Deep South wunderkind, thought to be the first person of colour to have a shot at the Republican presidential nomination, was selected to give the Republican response to Obama's quasi-state of the union address. Obama was expectedly good. Jindal, by comparison, was sophomoric. He had a few minutes of national television exposure and he bombed.

Now Jindal seems to be grabbing for the Limbot lifeboat. While in Washington for a fundraiser, Jindal said it's okay for Republicans to want President Obama to fail if they think he's jeopardizing the country. I expect we'll hear a lot more of this sort of thing from Jindal as he gropes his way toward a run for the Republican nomination in 2012.

Drabinsky, Gottlieb Found Guilty

It's been 14-years since Toronto's Livent went defunct. Today it's founders, Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb, were ruled guilty of fraud and forgery.

Prosecutors claimed the two doctored the Livent books which helped them lure in up to $500-million in investment.

Sentencing hasn't come down but, with that kind of money involved, it's a pretty sure bet that Messrs. Drabinsky and Gottlieb are looking at an all-expenses paid stay in Greybar Hotel.

It's a sad day. These two were true driving forces in Toronto's cultural sector.

Stuck on Wide Open

Who do we blame for the mess we've made of the world?

A discussion hosted by another blogger a couple of weeks back pointed the finger at the 50's generation of Baby Boomers with their selfish, mass consumption as the culprits. I think that's wrong.

For all their excesses and self-indulgence, the Baby Boomers were merely fulfilling an economic imperative cast for them long before they arrived on spaceship earth that had its roots in the industrial revolution, the Great Depression and the World Wars of the 20th century.

Our parents, the incredible generation that threaded its way through the depression and WWII, set about to make up for lost time - hence the Baby Boom. Something like 70% of the world's remaining industrial capacity was in North America - new factories, new machinery and a skilled labour force. America's pre-war industrial rival, Europe, was a bombed-out hulk. The disparity between North America and the rest of the world was greater than it has been at any time since the end of the 19th Century. If you were in Africa and you needed a truck, you probably bought one made in Detroit because that's where trucks came from back then. There were a lot of middle class, single-income families doing just fine, thank you very much, in Ozzie and Harrietland.

My parents started off with an 800-sq. ft. house before moving into what had to be a 1,200-sq. ft. house that a handful of years later was replaced by a 1,600-sq. ft. house that led to them building their 2,500 sq. ft. waterfront "dream house" where they lived for 30-years, the last 15 of them as empty-nesters. The last time I saw their house it looked small. It was a big house when it was surrounded by groves of trees and farmland. Today the trees and farmland are history, taken over by a suburban madness of 4,000 sq. ft. McMansions on 6,000 sq. ft. lots. There's one waterfront monster that comes in at 18,000-sq. ft., has a double yacht boat well and a lovely pair of davits for launching the jet skis.

This monster house madness is surely the culmination of an economic model that we inflicted on ourselves. Society's wellness was slaved to growth which meant unrestrained consumption was the order of the day. The model was to produce as much as could be sold at the best economic price and to purchase as much as could be had with one's income. You either bought goods and services, the whole gamut of needs and wants, or you bought an interest in the means of production itself, investments in what you had to hope would be particularly profitable businesses selling goods and services to other buyers.

Our cars got bigger and faster and more luxurious; our homes grew to proportions at least one class higher than we had in the previous generation; holidays abroad went from being the preserve of the best off to an aimless diversion for college kids on spring break. Kids, whose parents watched black and white TV and played with clumsy Dinky Toys and rode ordinary, direct drive bikes, grew up with cell phones, colour TVs, game consoles and 21-gear mountain bikes with full suspension and disc brakes.

So yes, we've had it good. Probably far too good. But it hasn't been something that can be laid at the feet of the 50's generation. The blame rests with pretty much everybody of voting age today. It's not a decadal issue. It spans an era, the post-WWII era.

I think I've figured out what happened, where we went wrong. We behaved as we were conditioned to behave, as we were expected to behave, as society required us to behave but that's hardly an excuse. The path was fixed while we had no concept of the consequences of our way of life but ignorance isn't an excuse either.

It all fell apart when my parents' generation and my generation and every generation since abandoned posterity. Many years ago Bill Moyers did an excellent documentary series on posterity. He interviewed some of the greatest thinkers in America on the role posterity had played in shaping that country, how it came to vanish and how and when it might return.

Posterity doesn't fit into our economic model of production and consumption because it creates a fetter on both. We have lost our understanding of the importance of posterity to our society, to our country. We no longer plan today for generations to come far in the future. We no longer look much beyond the next electoral cycle.

Protecting posterity is an act of collective consciousness and will. It is acknowledging that we're entitled to our fair share and no more. We can't have it all without depriving future generations of their fair share. To try to understand the idea of "fair share" imagine if our great, great, great grandparents had followed our path.

Imagine if our ancestors had two things - the ability to consume everything they could get their hands on and a blind indifference to the day when it was our turn to populate this country. Imagine if two or three generations had gone on a rapacious binge gobbling up the world's resources; going into serious deficit on renewables (emptying the oceans, logging off the forests, transforming farmland into desert) and fouling the environment. Then consider how their depredations might impact on your life today. I think that's beyond the imagination of all but the best science fiction writers but that's of no real matter. It's enough in any event to make the case for posterity and the concept of "fair share."

We are not of a generation but of an era that has brought mankind to the wall where the race to consume ends, and ends badly. Yet we have leaders of such astonishing stupidity as to herald Canada as a fossil-fuel superpower for the 21st Century and to proclaim bitumen as a key to national unity and who continue to worship idols at the altar of eternal, damning growth. Where do we find these morons and why do we continue to praise them? These cheap hucksters and fixers have no answers for us, no good place to lead us to and they're utterly bereft of any vision of the future of our country and the legacy we bequeath to those generations of Canadians yet to be born.

If you doubt what I've said, ask Michael Ignatieff or Stephen Harper what they think Canada will be in a hundred years, what sort of future will it hold for our great, great, great grandchildren? If they hold themselves out as fit to lead, they ought to have some fairly specific answers to that and, if they don't, they should be run out on a rail. Because the future of our great, great, great grandchildren is being written today and it's being written indelibly.

Ask them how they will seek to redress our excessive consumption and pointless indulgence. Ask them if they will embrace the "fair share" concept and just what they will do to restore the role of posterity in government policy making. You had better ask them because you're not going to hear a word of it coming out of their mouths otherwise.

It's Raining and Am I Grateful

People living in coastal British Columbia don't much care for this time of year. Some of us call the interval between October and May the "Rain Festival." It rains, a lot. Newcomers are particularly prone to finding the protracted cloudy, rainy conditions more than a bit depressing. Some pack up and leave - or claim they're going to.

The steadily changing global climate has changed the face of the rainy season. With so much of the world lacking water, it becomes much easier to appreciate by those who get plenty of the stuff. The Weather Channel outlook for my town calls for rain on twelve of the next fourteen days. Most of that will run off into the ocean this year as it has since time immemorial but, before long, we may have to divert that runoff into reservoirs in the local mountains to ensure supply during the dry season. The important part is that we can do just that if we need to. Most of the world isn't so lucky.

The World Water Forum has just wrapped up in Turkey. It didn't really achieve much except to infuriate environmentalists. From Deutsche Welle:

...campaigners representing the rural poor, the environment and organized labor attacked the forum as a vehicle for water privatization and called for it to be placed under the UN flag.

"We demand that the allocation of water be decided in an open, transparent and democratic forum rather than in a trade show for the world's large corporations," said Maude Barlow, senior advisor to the president of the UN General Assembly.

The World Water Forum is staged by the World Water Council, a French-based organization whose funding comes in large part from the water industry.

Water shortages are now spreading into North America, particularly the southern US. We're coming to understand the price that we'll have to pay for taking water pretty much for granted over the past century. In most of the world and large parts of North America we've been running a freshwater deficit, draining far more of it than nature can replenish. What we couldn't get from rivers and lakes we pumped out of acquifers heedless of the fact that we were developing a society dependent on water supplies that could not be maintained. We've been burning that candle at both ends and we're getting very close to the middle.

Global warming won't reduce precipitation. A warmer atmosphere will allow more water vapour to form (itself a greenhouse gas) hence more rain. The problem is that climate change alters precipitation patterns. It gives rise to feast or famine conditions, drought and floods often in the same place in the same year. California has been cycling through this for some time. One Californian recently described his state as having four seasons - flood, drought, fire and earthquakes.

Water is as fundamental to any society as the foundation is to your house. While it's intact, your house is fine. When it collapses, so does your house. Societies need a steady and reliable supply of fresh water for drinking, washing, sanitation, industry and, of course, agriculture. The rarely mentioned scourge of the Athabasca Tar Sands is the massive amount of water taken to extract and process bitumen and the resulting water contamination left behind. Remember Mikey, it's more than CO2.

There is water in abundance - in the oceans - but converting it to freshwater is expensive, uses a lot of fossil fuel and leaves some pretty nasty residue to be disposed of, usually back into the sea. And, of course, the further you have to transport it from the coast the greater the cost. It should be a last resort and in parts of the Middle East it's just that but one they're resorting to quite freely.

We really have to stop taking water for granted and we have to open our eyes to the predicament we're facing, even here in Canada. The Grand Old Man of Alberta, former premier Peter Lougheed knows that there's trouble on the horizon for his province and Saskatchewan. When we settled and developed them we thought we understood the environment there. Only recently have we discovered that the period since the arrival of Europeans has been unduly wet. What we thought of as normal wasn't. Science has now shown that the "normal" conditions for the prairie provinces include mega-droughts up to to 60-years duration. Not exactly ideal conditions for urban development.

For some reason we're compelled to treat the current bounty as the status quo. Yet the longer we let this go unmet, the more difficult becomes the challenge of adaptation when we finally must act.

Maude Barlow wants the water issue placed at the top of the pile for discussion and debate. She's right.

Last Call for the Almighty Dollar?

The American dollar has been the currency of international trade for most, probably all of your lifetime. That may be about to change.

At last year's OPEC summit, a mistakenly live microphone transmitted a discussion about dropping the exclusive use of the US dollar for pricing oil in favour of a basket of currencies, including the Euro and others.

Some Europeans have been musing recently about ditching the greenback. Now it's the Chinese. From the Associated Press:

China is calling for a new global currency controlled by the International Monetary Fund. Ahead of a London summit of global leaders, the country is stepping up pressure for changes to a financial system dominated by the U.S. dollar and Western governments.

[Chinese central bank] Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan's essay did not mention the dollar by name.
But it said the crisis showed the dangers of relying on one country's currency for international payments.

In an unusual step, the essay was published in both Chinese and English, making clear it was meant for an international audience.

The world's acceptance of the United States dollar as its reserve currency has helped America cope with its crushing debt situation. China, for example, holds a trillion dollars worth of US reserves which gives it a compelling interest in maintaining the health of the American economy. If a distinct global currency emerged, America could suddenly feel the sting of exchange fluctuations and a weakening of foreign support for its economy.

A Case to Answer

The Guardian has reported on a 3-week investigation into war crimes during the assault on Gaza. It would be rash to conclude, based on the reporters' accounts, that Israel committed the alleged crimes and the Israeli military flatly denies each and every allegation. However these reports don't stand alone. They're also corroborated by reports coming in from the United Nations, the Red Cross and numerous humanitarian organizations. Worse yet, they're consistent with statements now coming out from Israeli soldiers who took part in the attacks.

These accounts, from such diverse sources - Palestinian, Israeli and neutral - warrant a formal investigation or inquiry. Unfortunately that would have to be ordered by the UN Security Council and subject to veto by the United States.

Will the Canadian government call for such an investigation? Will the leader of the Official Opposition? What do you think? I think they would like to pretend this never happened.

Read the story and watch the three video reports here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-war-crimes-guardian

Obama Makes His Move

The White House may finally move to seize debt-ridden insurance companies. The Washington Post says that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has asked Congress for authority to take over non-bank financial institutions whose failure could torpedo the American economy.

The target is AIG, the giant American International Group.

The idea seems to be that it's cheaper for the government to simply take over AIG, pay out its book value to its creditors, and then get it back in business with a clean slate and return it to private ownership. The key is to keep the business operating as a going concern while the government resolves the company's crushing debt load.

"The administration's proposal contains two pieces. First, it would empower a government agency to take on the new role of systemic risk regulator with broad oversight of any and all financial firms whose failure could disrupt the broader economy. The Federal Reserve is widely considered to be the leading candidate for this assignment. But some critics warn that this could conflict with the Fed's other responsibilities, particularly its control over monetary policy.

"The government also would assume the authority to seize such firms if they totter toward failure.

"Besides seizing a company outright, the Treasury Secretary could use a range of tools to prevent its collapse, such as guaranteeing losses, buying assets or taking a partial ownership stake. Such authority also would allow the government to break contracts, such as the agreements to pay $165 million in bonuses to employees of AIG's most troubled unit."

While the Republican insurgency will try to block the move it appears that there's enough support among congressional Democrats to push it through.

Dear Michael

Hi, it's me again. I know I'm not your favourite follower but I do consider myself a genuine Liberal so I hope you'll indulge me one more time.

It's about that guy from the Jewish Defence League, Peter Kent's pal Meir Weinstein. I'm sure you heard that Weinstein has been working overtime to keep British MP George Galloway out of Canada. In response to Galloway's Canadian defenders and the MPs vow to speak to Canadians some other way, Weinstein said, “If he uses those other means, we will see to it that the Canadian government will be monitoring every individual and organization that will have anything to do with it.”

Now Mike that sounds to me like this guy is saying he'll "see to it" that the Canadian government will be spying on individuals and organizations that happen to offend the JDL. Now I don't know you very well but I have known Liberal leaders in the past and I honestly can't think of one who wouldn't stand up for Canadians and their democratic freedoms in the face of these bullying threats.

You're the leader of the Official Opposition. For that you get a nice salary, a bunch of perks and a house to boot. But you're supposed to do more than write slightly tedious book reviews for the New York Times. You're supposed to stand up for us, the Canadian people or have I just had that wrong these last 60-years?

Mike, Weinstein makes it sound as though he's got the Harper government in his pocket and it even looks like he does. The government hasn't rebuked Weinstein or repudiated his inference that he'll have them monitor dissenting Canadians.

So Mike, if the government isn't going to stand up for the Canadian people, what's your excuse?

Want to Hit Back at Fox? Call Your Cable Company.

That little nest of diseased vipers also known as Fox News has really gone too far in mocking Canada's military and our contribution to the war in Afghanistan.

No point e-mailing Fox. Straight into the electronic dustbin.

Here's something you can do. Write your cable provider - Shaw or Rogers mainly - and demand that they drop Fox News from their lineup. They've already got plenty of porn channels, Fox News won't be missed.

Jonathon Kay Bites Fox News on the Ass

It takes some doing for a scribbler from the National Toast to tear a strip off Fox News but that only makes today's piece by Jonathan Kay that much more enjoyable. Read it for yourself:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03/23/jonathan-kay-on-the-juvenile-rantings-of-greg-gutfeld-and-while-i-m-at-it-ann-coulter.aspx

Last I heard, CanWest, Kay's employer, owner of the financially challenged rag, also held the Canadian rights to Fox.

There's Nothing Sinister in Being Left-Handed

Yes we're a minority but aren't the "best & brightest" always a minority?

The Washington Post today tries to figure out the left-handed advantage. Five of the past seven US presidents have been lefties including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (alright, Reagan is in there too).

It may be a fluke. But even if it isn't, exactly what left-handedness has to do with political skill, intelligence, popularity, family connections, wealth and luck -- all at play in our selection of national leaders -- is almost certainly a matter of subtle advantage, not one of dramatic benefit.

Yes that's right you great unwashed horde of right-handed peasants. We lefties rule! And we know it.

We may be outnumbered but our ranks are legend and include: Jon Stewart, Helen Keller, John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Baden-Powell, David Letterman, Matt Groening, Henry Ford, Osama bin Laden (oops, how did he get in?), Jack the Ripper, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, Jimi Hendrix, and an endless swarm of legendary actors, entertainers and athletes; George Patton, Winston Churchill, Napoleon, Alexander the Great - beginning to get the picture yet? - Hans Christian Anderson, James Baldwin and Lewis Carrol, Mark Twain and H.G. Wells, Bob Dylan and (gulp) Celine Dion, Simon Bolivar and Julius Caesar, Charlemagne and Horatio Nelson, Aristotle and Nietzsche, Samuel Adams and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Bill Gates and John D. Rockefeller, Clarence Darrow, F. Lee Bailey and Melvin Belli, Marie Curie and Linus Pauling, Albert Einstein, Dr. Albert Schweitzer.

The list goes on and on from Pharaohs to the great conquerors of the world, the best and brightest. I feel positively sorry for you less gifted types but it's not like you're hard done by. Left in Latin is "sinister", in French it's "gauche." In Latin, right is "dexter." Being ambidextrous means "both right." Right has somehow come to mean correct or good. As a noun it's a benefit, freedom or privilege. You'll never see a Bill of Lefts, will you?

You Too Can Be a Border Patrol Agent - Seriously, You Can!

Want to help keep America's border with Mexico safe?

Well if you really have nothing else to do with your time you can log onto http://www.blueservo.net/ and sign up to become a volunteer with the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition Texas Virtual Neighborhood Watch programme.

The programme has a network of web cams set up to allow volunteers to monitor border areas for drug smugglers and illegal immigrants seeking to find their fortune in the United States. 15 cameras are up and running. The network will eventually have 200 in all.

Afghanistan's Delusion of Sovereignty or How the West Wants to Topple Hamid Karzai

Afghanistan is a sovereign nation, right? It's had a parliamentary election and another is just months away. It has a constitution. It has a judiciary. It has a president and a cabinet and a legislature. It has an army and a national police force. That sounds pretty much like a sovereign state - only it's not.

A report in The Guardian claims that the US and key European allies want to bypass president Hamid Karzai by "appointing" a prime minister to serve as Afghanistan's chief executive. They're also looking at ways to bypass Kabul so that aid money goes directly to the provinces.

Many US and European officials have become disillusioned with the extent of the corruption and incompetence in the Karzai government, but most now believe there are no credible alternatives, and predict the Afghan president will win re-election in August.

...A diplomat with knowledge of the review said: "Karzai is not delivering. If we are going to support his government, it has to be run properly to ensure the levels of corruption decrease, not increase. The levels of corruption are frightening."

Another diplomat said alternatives to Karzai had been explored and discarded: "No one could be sure that someone else would not turn out to be 10 times worse. It is not a great position."

"Not a great position" indeed. It's sort of like toppling the very government the West installed. This should send droves of nationalists flocking to join the ranks of the insurgency. Worse yet, it will give some of the corrupt warlords who've been sitting on the fence reason to also begin supporting the insurgency. After all, if Karzai is going to be sidelined by the West, it undermines the warlords' motivation to support the central government which could be enough to nudge the insurgency into a full-blown civil war.

The risk for the US is that the imposition of a technocrat alongside Karzai would be viewed as colonialism, even though that figure would be an Afghan. Karzai declared his intention last week to resist a dilution of his power. Last week he accused an unnamed foreign government of trying to weaken central government in Kabul.

"That is not their job," the Afghan president said. "Afghanistan will never be a puppet state."

Oh yeah? Says who?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/22/us-afghan-plan-to-bypass-karzai

The Rot in Karzai's Government

It was last year that the eminent British think tank commonly known as Chatham House diagnosed Afghanistan's fatal affliction as the "nexus" of a corrupt government, a narco-economy and the Taliban insurgency which the Royal Institute described as being hand in glove.

Better late than never, The Globe & Mail reports that corrupt Afghan officials are facilitating the drug trade that then assists the Taliban. Quelle surprise!

In the shadow of the craggy mountains overlooking the road between Kabul and the eastern city of Jalalabad, a specially trained unit of police conducted a nearly perfect ambush of a drug dealer.

Officers surrounded Sayyed Jan's vehicle so quickly that his two bodyguards never had a chance to fire their weapons, and he was caught moving at least 183 kilograms of pure heroin.

But the Counternarcotics Police of Afghanistan realized they had a problem when they discovered that Mr. Jan's powerful friends included their own boss. The drug dealer was carrying a signed letter of protection from General Mohammed Daud Daud, the deputy minister of interior responsible for counternarcotics, widely considered Afghanistan's most powerful anti-drug czar.

That document, along with other papers and interviews with well-placed sources, show that Gen. Daud has safeguarded shipments of illegal opiates even as he commands thousands of officers sworn to fight the trade. Some accuse the deputy minister of taking a major cut of dealers' profits, ranking him among the biggest players in Afghanistan's $3-billion (U.S.) drug industry.

General Daud in cahoots with drug traffickers you say? General Daud, former commander of the Northern Alliance, hero of the Battle of Kunduz? General Daud, appointed by Hamid Karzai as the Deputy Ministry of Interior for Counternarcotics. He is also the head of the Counter Narcotics Police of Afghanistan (CNPA). That Daud?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090320.wafghandrugs21/BNStory/Afghanistan/home

McKay Knocked From NATO Perch?

It looks like DefMin Peter MacKay's chance of becoming NATO Secretary-General has died on the vine. Just weeks ago the media were reporting that MacKay had the backing of Joe Biden.
Word is out that, whatever Biden may think about it, the US will instead be backing Danish prime minister Anders Rasmussen to succeed Jaap de Hoop Scheffer when he steps down on July 31.

Without Washington's support the idea of a non-European NATO Sec-Gen is a non-starter.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/03/21/us-nato-rasmussen.html

Sorry Bill, We Saw Them Kill Robert Dziekanski

The Tory bureaucrat handed the reins of the RCMP by Stephen Harper has come out with his first statement on the tasering death of Robert Dziekanski and it's a remarkably lame dodge at that.

Commissioner Bill Elliot says the public - those of us who've had the chance to watch that grotesque video - shouldn't prejudge the four young, fit, healthy, armed and armoured cops who put Dziekanski to death. From the Conservative Television Network:

...Elliott has called on the public to wait for "a sober, sound examination of the facts and the circumstance" before forming negative opinions of the national police force.

... Elliott said the public must understand the very quick decisions that RCMP officers are forced to make when working on the job.

"They don't realize how quickly things happen and they don't realize how quickly often -- unfortunately -- bad things happen."

Well Bill, the execution of Robert Dziekanski was certainly quick so I guess you've got a point there. And rest assured Mr. Commissioner that we do understand. Everyone around the world who watched that video understands. Everyone who has read the astonishing and false statements the officers gave in the immediate aftermath understands. These are guys who are trained observers and yet, before they were aware that a civilian video existed, they all gave accounts completely dispelled by that video.

Bill, we understand. We get it. Do you?

In the Name of the Liberal Party of Canada

"At the beginning the directive was to enter a house with an armoured vehicle, to break the door down, to start shooting inside and – I call it murder – to shoot at everyone we identify. In the beginning I asked myself how could this make sense? Higher-ups said it is permissible because everyone left in the city [Gaza City] is culpable because they didn't run away."

That is the testimony of a squad leader of the Israeli Army that rolled over the Palestinian population of Gaza, one of many such accounts now pouring out from Israeli soldiers plagued by their consciences.

And why the total silence from the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada who condoned this butchery and absolved Israel, in advance, for these deaths claiming that the deaths of Palestinian civilians at the hands of Israeli troops was to be blamed on Hamas. This is what Michael Ignatieff did in the name of the Liberal Party of Canada and its members.

Evidence that can only be described as grotesque is coming out not from Hamas, not from Palestinians, not from international relief workers but from Israeli soldiers, the very people who had their fingers on the triggers. Among other things they tell of military rabbis who exhorted the soldiers to ethnically cleanse the Holy Land of Israel, God's Israel, of these Palestinian gentiles.

Were any of these possibilities in Michael Ignatieff's mind when he threw the Liberal Party's wholehearted support behind Israel at the outset of this conflict? It brings to mind the words of another Liberal MP from 2006:

"Michael is an intelligent person and I would think that he would have a better handle on the Middle East given his years of experience on human rights and international law."

That was Susan Kadis rebuking Iggy for labelling the Israeli cluster bombing of the Lebanese village of Qana a "war crime." Ignatieff was unquestionably right on the cluster bombing and I'm sure he knew it just as he knew that saying so was politically wrong. It was a defining moment in the life of the Liberal leader, one that carries on to this day. He's got a better handle now Sue.

Hey Iggy, You Backed THIS

I began having grave doubts about Michael Ignatieff's fitness to lead the Liberal Party when he gave his unequivocal endorsement of Israel's attack on Gaza. It was neither balanced nor nuanced and seemed calculated to appeal to a certain voting demographic at home at the cost of abandoning traditional Liberal even-handedness. Ignatieff essentially absolved Israel of blame for its actions in Gaza.

The problem with Iggy's reckless absolutism on the Israeli war on Gaza is getting tainted with the unfortunate aftermath, being stuck with having endorsed what were, in reality, war crimes. From the Associated Press:

JERUSALEM (AP) — An increasingly disturbing picture of the Israeli army's conduct in the Gaza war emerged Friday, as new witness accounts from Israeli troops described wanton vandalism to Palestinian homes, humiliation of civilians and loose rules of engagement that resulted in unnecessary civilian deaths.

The revelations of soldier conduct over the past two days have set off soul-searching and alarm in a country where the military is widely revered. They also have echoed Palestinian allegations that Israel's assault did not distinguish between civilians and combatants, at a time when some international human rights groups contend Israel violated the laws of war.

...The Israeli government has insisted it did all it could to prevent civilian casualties, but on Thursday, the army ordered a criminal inquiry into its own soldiers' reports that some troops killed civilians, including children, by hastily opening fire, confident that the relaxed rules of engagement would protect them.

The inquiry was based on postwar testimony from a gathering of soldiers involved in the offensive, published in a military institute's newsletter and leaked to two Israeli newspapers. The Haaretz daily published additional details Friday, and the transcript of the session was obtained by The Associated Press.

...Another soldier, Ram, described what appeared to be a rift between secular and religious soldiers.

"What I do remember in particular at the beginning is the feeling of an almost religious mission," he said. He described a "huge gap" between background material provided by the army's education corps, and religious material distributed by the army's rabbinate.

"Their message was very clear: 'We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle. God brought us back to this land, and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land,'" he said.

Read the entire report here: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ioi_0jtO9RjMwPNRoXNCndRPRq3gD97204S80

This is the reality Michael Ignatieff finds politically expedient to ignore. I honestly don't see how that sort of person is fit to lead the Liberal Party of Canada.

Four More Dead in Kandahar

Two bombs, four Canadian dead. Eight other soldiers wounded. What are we doing, trolling for land mines?

There's a sickening futility to this carnage. It's death delivered by remote control, the enemy unseen or even long gone. It speaks to who actually controls the territory - those who are able to plant and conceal these explosives with impunity.


http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/03/20/afghanistan-soldiers.html

Climates of Fear

You have to give them their due. Over the past decade, the right wing has demonstrated an unrivalled mastery of fear as a tool of political manipulation. It's said that humans have a strong attraction to fear which accounts for the steady stream of horror movies and action flicks. I guess that makes us predisposed to a Pavlovian response when we're bombarded with warnings of imminent danger, real or simply imagined.

Right wingers - politicians, preachers and pundits - use fear as a construct, carefully crafting a subset of things to fear and, just as importantly, things not to fear. Things to fear include terrorism, foreigners and socialism. Things not to fear range from global warming to authoritarianism. It gives rise to a black and white, good/bad dichotomy that, by virtue of its simplicity and absolutism becomes ridiculously easy to inculcate and perpetuate.

We know that, with rare exception, virtually nothing is truly black or white. It's all varying shades of grey but sometimes things that are genuinely dingy are still presented to us as white and pure and good. The more we're conditioned by fear the more likely we are to have prejudices and biases that allow us to accept as white what is truly grey. Isn't that after all the real basis of the "my enemy's enemy" line of thought?

I don't much care for the American national anthem but the last line is genuinely prescient. "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave." There's a direct link between bravery and freedom. There is no freedom without bravery. What is bravery then? Isn't it the rejection and overcoming of fear? You may still be afraid but you're brave enough to confront your fear and surmount it.

What is terrorism but the application of fear to achieve a desired response? The whole essence of terrorism is to provoke a predictable reaction. Fear, palpable even tangible, that sends people racing out to empty hardware store shelves of plastic sheeting and duct tape.

The Bush-Cheney regime used fear as a weapon or tool against the American people. Armed with their talking points they would barrage the American public by swamping the media with images of Saddam Hussein and mushroom clouds or chemical weapon attacks on the Homeland. Remember Homeland Security director Tom Ridge's colour-coded alert system that curiously only seemed to spike at moments when political interests also peaked?

Fear was used by the White House against the American people to garner support for a bellicose foreign policy and illegal wars of conquest and occupation. Fear was used to render the public insecure enough that they would surrender constitutional freedoms and protections and accept a more invasive, authoritarian government; an oligarchy that served the most advantaged to the detriment of all others.

The Islamist terrorists wanted the American people afraid, cowed. So did the American administration. The Republicans saw fear as a means to win undeserved electoral victories.

Speaking from the grave, Dick Cheney came out last week to have the complacent American media spread the word that Obama's decision to close Guantanamo would leave the United States vulnerable to another terrorist attack. Now you would have thought a responsible media would have placed Cheney's warning in the context of the litany of lies and empty propaganda he so shamelessly spun over the past eight years but, no, they didn't.

It's become clear of late that Congressional Republicans have decided to stick with the fear gameplan, to adopt it as their vehicle to undermine the public's confidence in Barack Obama. Ignoring the fact that it was the Republican Congress and administration that decriminalized the securities scams that have toppled the global economy and having no ideas beyond further insane tax cuts to remedy their country's predicament, these political hacks and their collaborative pundits are waging a determined campaign to make the American people fearful of their president and his measures to salvage America's economy. They shamelessly depict Obama's policies as begetting socialism and political tyranny.

It's a scary thing to be an American today. The former Comptroller General last year warned anyone who would listen that the American governments' debt and unfunded obligations such as Social Security represented an average indebtedness of $480,000 per household. That was before the bailout and stimulus emergency budgets. Who wouldn't be scared by that, especially those with employment insecurities and personal debt problems?

These are hard times indeed for much of the planet and particularly for the United States. It is now when America most needs a brave citizenry willing to look fearlessly at what they're facing and the arduous path to recovery. If they can find that bravery it is conceivable that America may emerge from this travail a better place than it has been since Reagan inflicted his toxic ideology on the country. If they can find that bravery, they just might restore their Constitution to its rightful place as the repository of their freedoms and protections. The Republicans know this. It's why they're so determined to once again enslave their own people with those damned rusty chains of fear.

Vancouver Cops' New Drug Policy

I'm not sure this isn't merely a restatement of what has already become standard procedure but Vancouver police patrolling the city's troubled Downtown Eastside will no longer be arresting and charging druggies for simple possession. The policy is intended to free up officers for street duties. From the Vancouver Sun:

"We'll come across people all day long who have maybe a few rocks of cocaine in their pocket, or maybe a bit of methamphetamine, [for] personal use," said Const. Jana McGuinness. "Technically, yes, you could arrest and you could tie up two officers for four hours writing a report like that.
"That's where the discretion will be employed. Where they can, say, seize the drugs, get the drugs off the street and then go about their business of being out there stopping other crimes."

Less paperwork will mean more officers on the street to tackle street disorder, McGuinness said. The police business plan identifies a number of behaviours the force is trying to curb, including aggressive panhandling, squeegeeing, open-air drug markets, unlicensed street vending and sleeping in city parks.

It's curious there's no mention of street prostitution. Obviously Vancouver is trying to clean up its streets before the tourists arrive for the 2010 Olympics

Pope's Euro Smackdown

Joe "The Rat" Ratzinger, better known to the likes of you as Pope Benedict Ex-Vee-Eye, just keeps stepping in it and tracking crap all across the Vatican carpets. It seems that when he opens his mouth, weird stuff can come out. His latest Holy Gaffe, on the eve of his scheduled tour of Africa, was to proclaim that the scourge of HIV/AIDS would be made worse, not better, by the distribution of condoms.

Now Pope Joe has the Euros in an uproar. France, Germany and Belgium to put the Divine Smackdown on Benny XVI. From The Guardian:

Eric Chevallier, a spokesman for the French foreign ministry, said in an online briefing: "France voices extremely sharp concern over the consequences of Benedict XVI's comments. While it is not up to us to pass judgment on church doctrine, we consider that such comments are a threat to public health policies and the duty to protect human life."

Laurette Onkelinx, Belgium's health minister, said the pope's comments reflected "a dangerous doctrinaire vision". "His declarations could demolish years of prevention and education and endanger many human lives," she said.

In Berlin, German health minister Ulla Schmidt and development minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul criticised the pope's remarks in a joint statement and underlined the importance of condom use in developing nations.


"Condoms save lives, in Europe as well as on other continents," the ministers said. "Modern assistance to the developing world today must make access to family planning available to the poorest of the poor especially the use of condoms. Anything else would be irresponsible."

If it's not the Holocaust, it's AIDS. Who made this guy pope anyway and what were they thinking?

When Earth Explodes

Dramatic video today of an underwater volcano erupting just off the coast of Tonga. We're told there's one of these things building off the west coast of Vancouver Island although ours is believed to be relatively small right now. Fortunately for the Tongans the prevailing Trade Winds are carrying the gas and pumice away, toward Fiji.

Obama Wants to Double Afghan Army

It's been a long, long time coming but finally an American administration has become serious about giving Afghanistan the army it needs. Afghan soldiers - not Europeans or North Americans.

The New York Times reports that Obama's vision for the way out of Afghanistan is to create an Afghan security force of 400,000 soldiers and national police officers more than three times the number that American commanders in 2002 thought would be sufficient. According to the paper, the plan is based on, "the hope that a much larger professional army and national police force could fill a void left by the central government and do more to promote stability in the country."

There is some concern that a mega-army could create a military rival for power with the Kabul government. We in the West have a fairly black and white opinion on military rule which has, in some cases, proven a better vehicle to democratic reform than corrupt civil administration. In some South American countries the societies were dominated by landed gentry, typically of European descent, in which social advancement for the native population was limited to the armed forces. The ruling class retained a decidedly oppressive grip on both power and wealth that was broken only by military coup. Now these things tend to be messy and they were fraught with betrayal and corruption but, eventually, they did in many cases make way for democratic reform.

We can build Afghanistan an army but we've done a miserable job at building that country an effective, democratic government and I suspect it's from that perspective that Obama has decided to focus on security rather than governance. He must've read that old memo about how securing Afghanistan would require 3-400,000 troops and worked out that trying to muster that many American forces was neither feasible nor, in the long term, would it be effective.

Once again you see clear logic in this president's thinking, not the dull "gut instinct" decision making of his predecessor.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in Congress. Based on their joint opinion piece in today's Washington Post, it would appear the Obama plan will be a winner with senators McCain and Lieberman:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/18/AR2009031802932.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Taliban Fodder

The Washington Post reports that Obama has decided to send hundreds of US diplomats and civil staffers to Afghanistan as part of its new civil-military strategy for that country.

It's hard to imagine what's to be gained from sending that many easy targets the Taliban's way. With the rapidly eroding security problem, even in major Afghan cities such as Kabul and Kandahar, protecting these people from the inevitable Taliban attack will be nigh impossible.

Leading the effort will be Peter W. Galbraith, son of the late John Kenneth Galbraith, and a veteran foreign service staffer. PWG has considerable experience of the region, having worked with Iraq's Kurds after Desert Storm.

The End of Casino Capitalism

Don't buy the optimistic "end of recession" hype you're getting from Harper says former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge.

Dodge told The Globe & Mail that this recession is going to be a lot longer and a lot deeper than predicted by our boy economist prime minister - the supposed economist who's gotten everything wrong going back to last summer.

“I think anybody would be dreaming in Technicolor to think that you're going to get through this by the third quarter of this year.”

..For his part, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has boasted that Canada will lead the turnaround. Ottawa expects a healthy recovery that will bring its books back into surplus by 2013.

“They're not going to do that. It's totally unrealistic,” said Mr. Dodge, who is now a senior adviser at law firm Bennett Jones LLP.

...he sees unemployment climbing to above 10 per cent in Canada, as well as a permanent, painful contraction of several mature industries such as automobile production and newsprint, and a sober reassessment of investment in oil sands.

Policy-makers, especially in Canada, need to be thinking longer-term and more “sensibly” about their recovery plans, he said, rather than setting up spending plans that just paper over today's problems or “piss money down a rat hole” in the hopes of a quick recovery.

...rather than obsess on designing short-term programs that will expire in a couple of years with the aim of returning quickly to surplus, he said, Ottawa should be spending in areas where there will be a payback to the Canadian economy later in the next decade, and where governments have not been able to spend sufficiently in the past.

Unfortunately, the only people who could have forced the government to "invest" in legitimate recovery spending, real infrastructure with clear payback benefits, were the Liberals. But, instead of standing up to Harper, they chose to sign on to the Tories pathetic "middle-class tax cut and nail a deck on the cottage" stimulus budget. Thus the Ignatieff Liberals ensured Canadians would get the burden of the massive deficit spending but almost none of the reward that ought to have been reaped from it. Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff got together, dropped their drawers, and pissed the taxpayers' money straight down a rat hole - of course not before Mike told Steve that he was "on probation."

Read more here:

http://business.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090317.wrdodge18/BNStory/Business/home

Mulroney Playing for Time

Brian Mulroney is looking for a 2-week adjournment of the public inquiry into his dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber.

Mulroney's lawyer contends the extension would give counsel more time to examine documents (gee, what have they been doing all these months?) and allow inquiry head, Justice Jeffrey Oliphant, time to clarify just how Mulroney's conduct is to be assessed.

Pratte wants a line drawn to demarc "above reproach" from "ordinary dirtbag." That fictional line would be the day Mulroney left office. From the Toronto Star:

Oliphant has already rejected a contention by Mulroney that the only proper yardstick for assessing his actions is the 1985 cabinet ethics code he himself put in place.

The judge served notice, in a ruling last month, that he would cast a wider net and take account of ethical provisions contained in federal statutes such as the Financial Administration Act, the Income Tax Act and even the Criminal Code.

Oliphant hastened to add that he didn't intend to draw any conclusions about civil or criminal liability, something he's barred from doing under his mandate.

He concluded, however, that he couldn't be bound by the narrow confines of the 1985 ethics code. "This inquiry is ultimately concerned with the good government of Canada," said the judge.

It's hard to say but Pratte seems to be invoking the legal maxim, "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." Mulroney's team also want to know what smoking guns Schreiber will bring to the inquiry. In the wake of the Commons ethics committee hearings, Schreiber has already disclosed documents suggesting that Mulroney aide Fred Doucet wasn't truthful when he told the committee, under oath, that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the Airbus-Air Canada deal. Doucet's evidence served to corroborate Mulroney's unsworn statements. If, as the documents appear to suggest, Doucet was lying, then it raises no end of questions about Mulroney's evidence.

If you're interested in what started this all, Stevie Cameron has reproduced the anonymous letter she received at The Globe and Mail. She also has the transcript of notes taken during her interviews with the Mulroneys' chef, Francois Martin.

http://steviecameronblog.blogspot.com/

If you're looking for more, check out the items done by The Fifth Estate at http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/unauthorizedchapter/schreiber.html

Joe the Rat Says - Condoms Cause AIDS

Pope Benny, aka Joe Ratzinger, is at it again. This time the Pope is in Africa where he opined that condoms contribute to the spread of AIDS. From Reuters:

"It (AIDS) cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem," he said in response to a question about the Church's widely contested position against the use of condoms.


http://www.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUSLH936617._CH_.2400

A Fine, Tory Idea

The Conservative government has announced it will put up just over $21-million to assist in training Afghan police and corrections officers.

Maybe when we get those Afghans all trained up we can bring some of them over here to train the RCMP.

Canada's Dysfunctional Little War

Our American cousins are getting annoying again. With another 17,000 troops en route to Afghanistan they'll soon have nearly a quarter of the force that would have had a chance at securing the countryside back in, say, 2003 when that was still a viable option.

Having utterly screwed up the Afghan war for the past eight years, the reinforced Americans are suddenly full of bright ideas, gratuitous advice and a bucketful of that arrogance that we've all come to know and love. The Washington Post interviewed various American commanders in Afghanistan who were outspoken about Canada and the other NATO forces:

When NATO forces were deployed to the south in 2006, the Canadians were assigned the province of Kandahar, the British got Helmand, and the Dutch were sent to Uruzgan. The three nations developed their own battle plans and agendas for development. They established provincial reconstruction teams that report to their capitals, not the NATO regional command at the Kandahar airport.

People at the regional command now joke that the three provinces should be renamed Canadahar, Helmandshire and Uruzdam.

"It's a totally dysfunctional way of fighting a war," said a U.S. officer in the south. "You've got each of these guys doing their own thing in their provinces with very little coordination."

The fractured approach is a result of demands imposed by NATO members as a condition of sending troops to Afghanistan. Each nation wanted its own chunk of the action so it could show off what it had accomplished. That model has been less problematic in the far north and west, where there has been less violence, and in the east, where the U.S. military has established its own command.

"The big question for NATO now isn't whether members are going to send more troops or what caveats will be placed on those troops, but whether the nations who have decided to stand up and fight will actually fight together," a senior U.S. military official said.

The task of trying to get everyone to collaborate has fallen to Nicholson, who is pushing the British, Canadians and Dutch to embrace a more integrated approach to war-fighting and development. "We need a coherent regional plan for victory," he said, "not a bunch of national plans for victory."

Wait just one minute. There may be real merit in these criticisms but the time for criticism was 2005, four years ago. The Dutch are set to leave next year and we're supposed to be out the year after that. You don't leave it until 2009 to try to reform the mission.

The American commander is right in calling for a "coherent regional plan for victory." That would begin with about 200,000 troops flooding the southern provinces to establish security and America has already given that idea a pass. NATO forces have never been in this war to win but neither has the lead partner, the United States, and, after all, when it comes right down to it, this is America's war.

When America's military gets into wars that go badly, there's a point at which they switch from war-fighting mode to finger-pointing mode as they gear up to dodge responsibility for failure. Anyone who was around to notice in the aftermath of Vietnam will recall how this game is played. The first line is "we never lost a battle." Then you simply pin the loss of the war on any convenient mark. You can blame the feckless politicians or the ungrateful civilians at home.

The parallel between Vietnam and Afghanistan is that the bad guys are fighting a different war than the war we're fighting over there. They're waging a political war, an insurgency. We're fighting a military war. We're bound to win all the battles in our war because we're the only side with artillery, tanks, attack helicopters and strike fighters. But our war doesn't matter except for conjuring up excuses and pointing fingers. It's their war that matters because that's the one that'll remain when our war has run its course and we've pulled up stakes.

So our generals and America's generals will beat their chests and bleat "it's not our fault" which, by definition, means it must be someone else's fault, it must be your fault. But it's America's generals who have the most blame to spread around and they'll smear it wherever it might stick, including their NATO allies.

The tide has changed. Last year the NATO forces were invaluable allies, this year they're hapless Surrender Monkeys. The Pentagon is getting ready to run up the White Flag.

A Dandy Primer on Credit Default Swaps

The Republicans decriminalized them, bogus insurance policies called Credit Default Swaps. These scams now total more than the global GDP. These are the ticking time bomb behind the global meltdown.



These swaps should be ruled null and void, written off the books entirely. There was no way any reasonable person would have or could have expected the CDS issuer to be able to pay them off if called.

Frum Pokes Bristol

I'm no great fan of David Frum but some of his missives during the post-apocalyptic Repug era have been pretty good. Today Frum takes a poke at Bristol Palin, what she means to hardcore Republicans and why they need to get out of this rut. From the National Toast:

Many conservatives carry in their heads a mental image of American society that’s a generation out of date. They imagine the existence of a huge class of socially conservative downscale voters, ready to vote Republican because of abortion and gay marriage.

The story of Bristol Palin should help puncture this illusion.

...Of children born to white women with a college degree, only 8% were born out of wedlock. But of children born to white women who did not finish college, 28% were born outside of marriage. Of children born to white women who stopped their education after high school, 42.1% were out of wedlock. And of births to white women like Bristol Palin, who have not completed high school, almost 61% were out of wedlock.

It may still be true ...that there remain many socially conservative voters who are “white, working- and middle-class, Catholic, small-town, rural, unionized, middle-age and seniors, and surviving on less than $50,000 a year.” But the key fact about those voters is tucked into the middle of that sequence of descriptors: “middle-aged and seniors.” Younger white downscale voters are a very different story.

It is marriage that creates culturally conservative voters – and young downscale Americans are not getting married. When they do marry, they do not stay married: While divorce rates among the college educated have declined sharply since the 1970s, divorce rates among high school graduates remain ominously high.

The socially conservative downscale voter is increasingly becoming a mirage – and a Republican politics based on that mirage will only lead us deeper into the desert.



One thing that Frum overlooks is those states which have the highest rates of education and marital stability and the lowest rates of unwed teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease - are Blue States. They vote solidly Democrat, they always have.

Frum's Republicans would have a better chance if they could get the people of the Slave States to begin acting more like the people of the Blue States but that isn't going to happen. They're going to remain America's cesspit of poverty, ignorance and bigotry.



http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03/13/david-frum-bristol-palin-and-the-conservative-mirage.aspx

Harper Drops a Whopper

According to Stephen Harper, understanding the global meltdown is simple - it's all the fault of American consumers and American investors. They didn't act like conservatives, you see.

It wasn't the doing of his American idols, Bush-Cheney. Remember Dick was the guy who proclaimed that "deficits don't matter." It wasn't their late-term lackey Alan Greenspan or voodoo economist, senate banking chairman Phil Gramm, or all their big Republican backers on Wall Street. It really had nothing to do with toxic derivative securities and equally lethal credit default swaps. The decriminalization of inherently corrupt Wall Street practices was irrelevant.

How does Harper find the strength to shovel that much horse shit behind the curtain?

Steve says the problem was that the Americans weren't conservative. He conveniently overlooks the Zero-Forty (zero money down, 40-year term) mortgages he and Flaherty unleashed on the market and later very quietly withdrew. Our Furious Leader is a total hypocrite. If he'd had his way we'd have been in the same mess that both Washington and London brewed up for their countries. He just didn't have enough time to undo the sound regulatory, banking and insurance regime bequeathed to him by Paul Martin along with balanced budgets and healthy "rainy day" surpluses.

Of course, Steve was peddling this crap at the "Manning Institute of Democracy" a conservative think-tank that seems to do so little thinking as to be able to swallow this nonsense.

Madoff - The Same Old Story Only Bigger

It's the same old story. A person holding the money of others in trust. A difficult moment arrives. The guy with the money decides to borrow a bit of it, just enough to weather the storm, just for a short time. He takes some of the money. He breaks the taboo just that once. He takes the money telling himself that he'll put it back before anyone even knows it's gone.

And from there on in the theft takes on a life of its own and grows bigger and bigger with each passing day. In very short order the void created from the theft becomes too big to fill, too big to cover up and then the original theft simply begets a continuum of ever larger thefts necessary to disguise the truth.

For Bernie Madoff this wasn't about the money he misappropriated. It was about what would happen to him, to his exalted reputation, if and when it was discovered. He didn't break the taboo because he wanted a few bucks, he broke it to protect Bernie Madoff and everything he'd built.

It's hard to say how often these scams work. They're very difficult to conceal in the long run and that's probably what sets Madoff apart from his garden variety confreres, the lawyers who bilk their clients of a few million. He got away with it for at least two decades while regulators somehow looked the other way, even ignoring specific warnings.

Madoff probably realized shortly after this began that there was no good way out for him, that the only thing undecided is when his day of reckoning would arrive. Unfortunately for his victims, Bernie Madoff didn't have the decency to turn himself in years ago.

A Most Curious Coup

Pakistan is on the verge of yet another coup, one that seems a lot different than Islamabad's normal fare. For one thing, it's being done almost openly. For another, it's being pushed by Washington and London. Another difference is that it's being presented as an ultimatum - change or we'll change you. A real big difference is that, although it appears the coup would be effected by Pakistan's military, the generals themselves wouldn't take over (as in Zia or Musharraf) but would install a civilian right off the bat.

The Hindu reports that Zardari has been put on a very short "or else" timeline by the West:

A volatile situation existed in Pakistan where authorities on Friday continued their crackdown on agitating lawyers staging a 'long march' amidst reports that President Asif Ali Zardari had been set an internationally-backed, 24-hour deadline by the army to end the stir.

Pakistan Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was reported to have got into the act on Friday, meeting Mr. Zardari for the first time since the president returned home Wednesday from a regional meeting in Tehran.

The 24-hour deadline was set under a new deal "backed by Washington, London and the army establishment", A Pakistan News, an independent website run by media professionals, said. There was no official confirmation of the report.

As part of the deal, the website quoted sources as saying, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani has been asked to "immediately convince" Mr. Zardari to "demonstrate the flexibility required" to break the deadlock before the thousands-strong lawyers' march reaches Islamabad.

According to the news website, Zardari was also "asked to go" by the army and Gilani "if he does not accept a new deal hatched by them in consultation with foreign powers".

Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that the Pakistan military doesn't want a military coup.

Stern Talk on Climate Change

Nick Stern, the economist commissioned by the British government to evaluate the impact of global warming, has returned to castigate politicians for failing to accept and act upon the climate threats facing mankind.

His stark warning about the potentially "devastating" consequences of global warming came as scientists issued a desperate plea last night for world leaders to curb greenhouse gas emissions or face an ecological and social disaster.

More than 2,500 climate experts from 80 countries at an emergency summit in Copenhagen said there is now "no excuse" for failing to act on global warming. A failure to agree strong carbon reduction targets at political negotiations this year could bring "abrupt or irreversible" shifts in climate that "will be very difficult for contemporary societies to cope with".

In a significant break from the scientific tradition not to comment directly on policy, the experts insisted politicians must stand up to "vested interests that increase emissions" and "build on a growing public desire for governments to act". They called for a "shift from ineffective governance and weak institutions to innovative leadership in government, the private sector and civil society".

Now I realize this is only 2,500 legitimate scientists and not the 300 or so tobacco lobby nutjobs corralled by the Heritage Institute who believe that warming is caused by sunspots, aliens and voles and merely mask a looming Ice Age

Read more here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/13/stern-attacks-politicians-climate-change

Yeah Steve, Canada's in the G-Bottom 7

Britain's foreign ministry has decided the G-20 maybe should be reduced to the G-13 and other hangers-on like Canada. After Stephen Harper has worked so hard to put Canada front and centre on the world stage, the Brits think we would be better placed toward the curtains on side stage. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Ahead of a G20 summit in London next month, Britain's foreign ministry has divided the grouping of leading economies into two distinct tiers, one of which has been targeted as "high-priority" for lobbying, the Financial Times said Friday.
The report will likely embarrass the British government just days ahead of a meeting of G20 finance ministers near London on Saturday, before the April 2 summit.
According to the document, which was a tender for public relations services issued in December by the government, the 11 countries are the United States, China, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and South Africa.

The remaining seven -- the G20 includes the European Union's rotating presidency -- are Russia, Australia, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey.

A spokesman for the ministry told the newspaper that the two-tier list was "absolutely not a firm hierarchy of the most important states for our political relations."

He said the 11 countries had been targeted for various reasons, such as having strong non-governmental organisations, media, academia, trade unions and civil society and "non-traditional actors like sovereign wealth funds".

We may not have a sovereign wealth fund but since when has Canada been a slacker on "strong, non-governmental organizations, media, academia, trade unions and civil society?" Christ, to get that from a Brit!

Monbiot - Mankind's Three Perils

Guardian correspondent George Monbiot is at the cutting edge of global warming reportage. Below is his latest article, reproduced in its entirety:

The more we know, the grimmer it gets.

Presentations by climate scientists at this week's conference in Copenhagen show that we might have underplayed the impacts of global warming in three important respects:

• Partly because the estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) took no account of meltwater from Greenland's glaciers, the rise in sea levels this century could be twice or three times as great as it forecast, with grave implications for coastal cities, farmland and freshwater reserves.

• Two degrees of warming in the Arctic (which is heating up much more quickly than the rest of the planet) could trigger a massive bacterial response in the soils there. As the permafrost melts, bacteria are able to start breaking down organic material that was previously locked up in ice, producing billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane. This could catalyse one of the world's most powerful positive feedback loops: warming causing more warming.

• Four degrees of warming could almost eliminate the Amazon rainforests, with appalling implications for biodiversity and regional weather patterns, and with the result that a massive new pulse of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. Trees are basically sticks of wet carbon. As they rot or burn, the carbon oxidises. This is another way in which climate feedbacks appear to have been underestimated in the last IPCC report.

Apart from the sheer animal panic I felt on reading these reports, two things jumped out at me. The first is that governments are relying on IPCC assessments that are years out of date even before they are published, as a result of the IPCC's extremely careful and laborious review and consensus process. This lends its reports great scientific weight, but it also means that the politicians using them as a guide to the cuts in greenhouse gases required are always well behind the curve. There is surely a strong case for the IPCC to publish interim reports every year, consisting of a summary of the latest science and its implications for global policy.

The second is that we have to stop calling it climate change. Using "climate change" to describe events like this, with their devastating implications for global food security, water supplies and human settlements, is like describing a foreign invasion as an unexpected visit, or bombs as unwanted deliveries. It's a ridiculously neutral term for the biggest potential catastrophe humankind has ever encountered.

I think we should call it "climate breakdown". Does anyone out there have a better idea?

Are we going to wake up in time? I know a couple of people working in this field. They both think the chances that we, mankind, will do anything really effective are very slim. One told me that, to keep showing up for work each day required a really strong sense of humour.

Arbour to International Crisis Group

Louise Arbour will be heading the International Crisis Group. From ICG's press release:

The Co-Chairs of the Board of the International Crisis Group, Lord Patten of Barnes and Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, are very pleased to announce that the Honourable Louise Arbour has been selected to be the organisation’s next President and CEO.

She will be formally confirmed by Crisis Group’s Board of Trustees at its meeting in Washington DC in April 2009 and take up the position in July.
Ms Arbour brings with her decades of practical experience in international affairs, having held many high-profile posts in her distinguished career.

From 2004 to 2008, she served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the highest office mandated by the international community to promote and protect human rights. Before this, she was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.

From 1996 to 1999, she served as the Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In these roles, she drove a significant expansion of trial activity, bringing tens of accused war criminals into custody and leading the Tribunal to issue the first war crimes indictment by an international court of a serving head of state, President Slobodan Milosevic.

“I am thrilled to be taking up this new position”, Louise Arbour said. “Understanding very well the influence Crisis Group has among top policymakers, I look forward to leading the organisation in finding ways to confront conflicts and potential conflicts around the world.”

What's the Holdup in Afghanistan?

This doesn't make any sense. NATO officials announced today that registration for the Afghan national elections is complete. According to the Associated Press report, 15.6-million people have been registered to vote, up from the 12.6 registered for the 2005 vote.

If voter registration is finished in mid-March, it's hard to understand why the general elections had to be postponed from May (the date under the Afghan constitution) to August (the date picked by the electoral commission).

It does sound like the fix is in. There has been speculation that the three-month delay is intended to allow potential rivals to Hamid Karzai to come forward and campaign.

Peter Puck Punked

This is the guy who "owned" Wayne Gretzky. How the mighty Pocklington has fallen.

Peter Pocklington was arrested on bankruptcy fraud charges in California. He's to be charged today with false bankruptcy filings and declarations.

According to The Globe: "He filed for personal bankruptcy in California last August, just two days after a raid on his previous residence, initiated by a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit. His net worth is listed in his bankruptcy filing at $2,900 and personal liabilities at $19.7-million."

The gist of the charges appears to be claims that Pete didn't quite disclose all his assets. Oopsie!

Our Global Ecological Ponzi Scheme

Physicist Joe Romm, of climateprogress.org, argues that, when it comes to the earth's climate and future generations, we're all Bernie Madoffs:

In our case, investors (i.e. current generations) are paying themselves (i.e. you and me) by taking the nonrenewable resources and livable climate from future generations. To perpetuate the high returns the rich countries in particular have been achieving in recent decades, we have been taking an ever greater fraction of nonrenewable energy resources (especially hydrocarbons) and natural capital (fresh water, arable land, forests, fisheries), and, the most important nonrenewable natural capital of all — a livable climate.

We aren’t all Madoffs in the sense of people who have knowingly created a fraudulent Ponzi scheme for humanity. But given all of the warnings from scientists and international governments over the past quarter-century (most recently two years ago with “Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly“) — it has gotten harder and harder for any of us to pretend that we are innocent victims, that we aren’t just hoping we can maintain our own personal wealth and well-being for a few more decades before the day of reckoning.


Read more here:

http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/08/ponzi-scheme-madoff-friedman-natural-capital-renewable-resources/

(photo - Charles Ponzi, father of all pyramid schemes)

Lincoln's Watch Mystery

The National Museum of American History confirmed a rumour today when it popped the back off Abraham Lincoln's watch to find a message engraved there on April 13, 1861 by watchmaker Jonathon Dillon.

Part of the inscription reads, "Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels" and "thank God we have a government." Sumpter was attacked the previous day by Confederate forces the day previous.

Also plainly visible is the engraving of "Jeff Davis" which must have referred to Jefferson Davis who served as president of the Confederate States of America throughout their existence from 1861 to 1865.

California - Running on Empty

The southwest has run dry. Years of drought and over-dependence on dwindling groundwater stocks has brought the Day of Reckoning to California and other states in that region.

Mother Nature played a dirty trick on us. When we came to settle the West (including our own Alberta and Saskatchewan), we thought that the rainfall patterns were normal. We grew our cities, states and provinces on that core assumption. We didn't know that the white man's arrival sort of coincided with what would be a century of unusually wet conditions. We didn't know that drought is normal in the West with mega-droughts of up to 60-years being the history of the region.

Then along comes global warming and the disruption of normal precipitation patterns. It's now become feast or famine - either too much rainfall causing floods and mudslides, or too little. California, America's market garden, has been especially hard hit. From Reuters:

Water raised leafy green Los Angeles from the desert and filled arid valleys with the nation's largest fruit and vegetable crop. Each time more water was needed, another megaproject was built, from dams of the major rivers to a canal stretching much of the length of the state.

But those methods are near their end. There is very little water left untapped and global warming, the gradual increase of temperature as carbon dioxide and other gases retain more of the sun's heat, has created new uncertainties.

Global warming pushes extremes. It prolongs drought while sometimes bringing deluges the parched earth cannot absorb. California Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow says two things keep him up at night: drought and flood.

University of Arkansas Ecological Engineeering professor Marty Matlock warns the essence of climate change is greater swings in precipitation -- and thus food production. At times of peak demand, prices can skyrocket, he said, as happened to food prices last year.

"There's no slack any more. The rope is tight, and if you give it a tug, it yanks on something," he said.

While farmers suffer, cities continue to grow. The sunny, warm American West remains a magnet.

"Add water and you have the instant good life," said James Powell, author of "Dead Pool," a book about global warming and water in the U.S. West.
"For the last few years, the driest states, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, have been the fastest growing. And you know that can't be sustained," he said.

California is looking at a basket of measures including conservation, groundwater rehabilitation, storm sewer water reclamation, new dams to catch torrential runoffs and desalination. California is actually luckier than many inland states but one thing is clear - its days of cheap water are just about over.

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE52900820090310?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

What's With Kinsella?

I'm always leery of people who seem to like litigation a little too much. Especially when it comes to serial defamation lawsuits it usually turns out that the aggrieved plaintiff comes across as taking their reputation a lot more seriously than others might.

Warren Kinsella is back at it again, suing over his hurt feelings. This time he's targeting the Conservative party and Public Works Minister Christian Paradis.

Mr. Kinsella figures he deserves a million dollars because of a press release that called him "unsavoury, dishonest and that Michael Ignatieff and the Liberal party of Canada" should sever ties with him.

Oh well.

France Is Back

40-years ago Charles de Gaulle created a furor when he pulled France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Well today the French military is back, returned to NATO command by Nick Sarkozy.

Gaullists ...fear France risks losing its independence and ability to act as a counterweight to the US.

Critics say the move means Paris would no longer be able to pursue its own diplomatic alliances and stand apart from Washington, particularly in the Arab world.

France is the fourth-largest troop contributor within NATO and its generals have commanded missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The French "one foot in the door" position of the past four decades has actually worked fairly well - for France anyway.

The French parliament will vote on the issue next week.

Pakistan - Here We Go Again

House arrests are back in fashion as the favourite tool to stifle dissent in Pakistan. The government has placed opposition leaders including Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif under house arrest and has rounded up "hundreds of lawyers and opposition activists" according to The Guardian.

Many opposition leaders are said to have gone into hiding. Pakistani lawyers, supported by opposition leaders, are due to begin a protest tomorrow dubbed the long march to demand the restoration of judges removed from office by the former president Pervez Musharraf.

President Asif Ali Zardari, husband of the assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, has failed to fulfil a pledge to restore the justices since being elected last year.

But the ban on public asssemblies is all for a good cause, namely, "to prevent a bad law-and-order situation." Indeed.

Makes you wonder how much longer the Pakistan Army will wait before it puts Zardari's wobbly government out of its misery?

UN Drug Policy - a Total Failure

A European commission report finds that the United Nations drug policy of the past decade has been an utter failure. From The Guardian:

Representatives from governments are split in their efforts to formulate an international drugs policy for the next decade. The UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs is due to formulate a strategy over the next two days, but there is widespread disagreement among delegates and a general feeling that an opportunity for a united approach has been lost.
In an article for the Guardian, Mike Trace, chairman of the International Drug Policy Consortium, says: "We're about to see the international community walk up the political and diplomatic path of least resistance. It will do nothing to help the millions of people around the world whose lives are destroyed by drug markets and drug use. And the depressing thing about it is that we can all book our seats for 2019, to go through this charade again."

The director of the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime, hardliner Antonio Maria Costa, describes the rise in organized crime as "one of the unintended consequences of drug control". Unintended as in undesired surely but hardly as in unforeseeable. Costa's position on drugs has been about as meaningful as the Bush administration's position on sexual abstinence training in high schools.

Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the global drug policy programme at the Open Society Institute, Warsaw, said: "It is now clear that after months of negotiations, millions of people around the world will continue to suffer needlessly. Thanks to the global 'war on drugs' over the past decade, close to 2 million people living in the former Soviet Union are infected with HIV, half a million US citizens languish in prison for non-violent, drug-related crimes, and billions of dollars are spent on destructive military actions in Colombia while the production of cocaine continues to rise."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/11/un-drug-strategy

Do You Feel Afraid?

Obama Veep Joe Biden says the situation in Afghanistan threatens the security of every NATO nation. That said, Biden then asked for suggestions from the Alliance nation's 26-ambassadors.

Biden's appearance was notable for the change in approach from the Bush/Cheney era of unilateralism.

A terror attack in Europe would be seen as an attack on the US, he said. "That is not hyperbole ... We view it as a gateway to further attacks on the United States. So please understand that this is not a US-centrist view that only if America is attacked is there a terrorist threat."

The vice president's visit comes less than a week after the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, also met Nato and EU foreign ministers in Brussels to discuss the volatile state, indicating that reaching out to allies to help in Afghanistan is now Washington's priority.

Obama is looking at how Nato's mission in Afghanistan can turn the tide in the volatile south of the country, which has seen a steady rise in fighting and losses. The top US military officer in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, said on Sunday that coalition forces were not winning the war in the south, which remains the centre of the Taliban-led insurgency.

Biden's approach of asking for suggestions doesn't reflect American weakness but rather a confluence of realities.

- This war is getting into its eighth year.

- The enemy, initially in disarray, has regrouped and returned, resurgent. The Taliban and al-Qaeda now threaten both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

- America's military has been worn down on the gristmill of Iraq leaving it unable to flood Afghanistan with the 2-300,000 troops that would be needed to secure that country.

- The Kabul government has degenerated into an ineffectual clubhouse for crooks, thugs and warlords while both corrupt government officials and the insurgency are fueled by the country's narco-economy.

- The insurgency, once the preserve of the Pashtun Taliban, has expanded to become a broadbased uprising embracing a variety of ethnic and nationalist supporters.

- The Islamabad government is also horribly wobbly, under attack by the Islamists while being closely scrutinized by Pakistan's generals. The Islamist influence is spreading through Pakistan's tribal lands.

- And, above all else, there is the Afghan people and the failing campaign for their "hearts and minds." We've pretty much worn out our welcome and support for these wars at home is flagging, the Achilles' Heel of counterinsurgency warfare.

Suggestions? It's going to take a lot more than suggestions to turn around this disaster. Bush not only slashed all four tires, he keyed the paint and poured sugar in the gas tank.

It's 2009 and, no matter what we say, we're on the defensive. Yes, we're staging Vietnam style "search and destroy" missions but they're turning out to be a lot more searching than destroying. Meanwhile the insurgents are consolidating their presence and control of the border regions and are encircling major cities including Kabul and Kandahar.

Perhaps it's not a question of whether our countries are under threat of attack from the Islamists but, instead, whether anything we're capable of doing in Afghanistan can possibly eliminate those threats?

Pakistan and the United States virtually created the mujahadeen. They funded them and armed them well enough for them to be able to drive out the Soviet army and topple the central government. What happened afterward? Did bin Laden's al-Qaeda soldiers carry on their war into the Soviet Union? No, of course not, they had nothing to gain from it. The Islamists did fight in Chechnya but that independence movement wasn't directly tied to Afghanistan.

So, is it safe to assume that leaving Afghanistan, no longer fighting them "over there," will mean we'll have to fight them at home, "over here?" That's been drummed into us for nearly eight years now, often enough that it's pretty widely accepted as gospel.

Osama bin Laden was on the scene 20-years ago when the Soviets pulled out. He didn't rally his forces to attack Moscow, did he? Washington used to argue that America couldn't leave Iraq relying on the "fight them there, not here" argument. It's curious how that mantra fell by the wayside.

With the exception of foreign terrorists drawn to Iraq by the American presence there, the homegrown gaggle of Iraqi insurgents were focused on internal power struggles. They weren't about to attack America because it would serve no purpose.

What if the Taliban did return as a political entity in Afghanistan? How bad would it be? Would Afghanistan return to civil war? Possibly although it can be argued that the insurgency has already morphed into a civil war.

There's really only one way to find out what would happen and that's to leave Afghanistan. If Karzai gets re-elected in August, it's hard to see what would be the point of staying. A legitimate, viable and popular state entity is the cornerstone of everything we could ever hope for in that country. What's the point of building an army if it is to serve an ineffectual and hopelessly corrupt government? Neither would last very long.

Eight years on, we're left with an awful lot of questions and very few answers, most of which are pretty grim. If the reason for NATO remaining in Afghanistan is fear of attack on the member states, somebody better show something that we've done in Afghanistan that's actually deterred such attacks over the past eight years. I've not heard that we've foiled any grand plots against our homelands in Afghanistan, have you?

British Columbia's "Trusted" Reporters

The Tyee takes a grizzly paw-size swipe at British Columbia's right-wing newspapers this week. It concerns the scam pulled by the Campbell faux-Liberals in 2002 to prepare the public for the transfer of B.C. Ferries to a private company.

A government memo marked "confidential" lays out the government's intricate plan to pitch the scheme to what they knew would be very wary voters.

An appendix to the strategy details the things the public might dislike about the change. There would be "public concern about steep increases in fares and cuts in service," it said.

"British Columbians are proud of and feel a sense of ownership in the ferry service," it added. And there would be "Public concerns about foreign ownership, especially by a U.S. company," a concern for which the spinners were yet to come up with a planned response.

And then there was the question of accountability: "Concerns that an independent BCFS will no longer be accountable to ferry users and the voting public at large." At least in the old days the public knew who to blame when something went wrong.

And who was the chief Judas goat? Why noneother than Mr. Integrity himself, then BC Ferries board chairman David Emerson. Cough, sputter, gag.

Even before the announcement, the communicators would be preparing the public for what was coming. "Leading up to announcement, arrange for David Emerson and other Board members to 'publicly muse' through briefings with trusted reporters about the Wright Report findings and the challenges facing BC Ferries."

Emerson and B.C. Ferries board members were to "place calls to key media" in the two weeks ahead of the announcement.

And who were the "trusted reporters" mentioned in the report? Well, they weren't named but the Tyee story noted which media ran inside stories prior to the public announcement - outfits like CanWest's Victoria Times Colonist, Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Province and Nanaimo Daily News.

Now there's nothing wrong with a reporter getting a leaked story or writing up a scoop but to be labelled, by the government, a "trusted reporter" who could be relied upon makes you wonder what else these scribes and their papers had done to establish their reliability credentials.

And yes, the public concerns the report identified were right on the money - and they've all come true.

http://thetyee.ca/News/2009/03/05/FerrySpin/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=090309

NATO's Last Secretary General a Canadian?

DefMin Peter MacKay is said to be in the running to replace the ineffectual Jaap de Hoop Scheffer as Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Given all he did for the Progressive Conservative Party, MacKay should have no trouble presiding over the demise of NATO too.

The New War on Terror - Narco-Terror

By now we're all too aware of the war underway in Mexico between drug cartels and the country's army and federal police force. It's bad enough that, in December, the Pentagon listed Mexico along with Pakistan as the two nations most in danger of sudden and total collapse.

To put it in some perspective, Canada has a force of 2,700 at war with the Taliban in Kandahar province. Mexico has a force of 60,000 at war with the drug cartels inside its own country.

The Guardian has just released an expose of the Latin American drug trade and how it has beset both the United States and Europe.

A new trafficking route between South America and west Africa has grown so quickly that the 10th latitude corridor connecting the continents has been dubbed Interstate 10.
Almost all those interviewed agreed that insatiable demand for cocaine in Europe and north America had thwarted US-led efforts to choke supply and inflicted enormous damage on Latin America.

"We consider the war on drugs a failure because the objectives have never been achieved," said César Gaviria, Colombia's former president and co-chair of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy.
"Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalisation have not yielded the expected results. We are today farther than ever from the goal of eradicating drugs."

The commission is urging a "paradigm shift" from repression to a public health approach, including decriminalisation of marijuana. Dismal statistics about coca cultivation, cocaine exports and murder rates have amplified calls to replace a policy which dates back to Nixon with one which focuses on curbing demand.

On Wednesday, ministers from around the world meet in Vienna to hammer out a new, UN drug policy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/09/cocaine-production-united-nations-summit

No More Growth - Even the NYT Gets It (Sort Of)

You have spent your entire time living in a society that worships on bended knee at the altar of Divine Growth. Like all good deities, the Lord Growth has evolved to meet the times.

In the wake of WWII there arrived the brief era of blind growth, catch up growth, go-for-it growth. We even grew babies by the tens of millions. Then came the Cold War and the era of patriotic growth. Big cars got bigger yet, so did houses and all the extra stuff we could jam into them. That really got into overdrive in the Greed is Good growth era. GiG was so grand that we created schemes of notional wealth, bubbles, and splurged with all the money we never really made. There were growth giants like the Dot.Com bubble and the Enron and WorldCom scams and, finally, a bubble for every American, the housing bubble.

Finally people began to notice the first wafts of smoke, the odd flicker of flame, and knew that something wasn't quite right with the world and with mankind. That's when we reached for the feel good solution - sustainable growth, sort of like light cream cheese. Eat all you want because it's sustainable. Free lunch for everybody.

Now we're finally, slowly beginning to realize that, as there is no free lunch, there's no such thing as sustainable growth either.

Now there might be room for sustainable growth in some areas but that's like saying we can all have shoes but just not food. Pretty soon you wind up having to eat your shoes and then the whole sustainable business falls apart.

I've written about our self-destructive, delusional addiction to growth for at least two decades which is why I was delighted this morning to discover that the New York Times' own Tom Friedman has finally found the light:

What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can’t do this anymore.

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.
“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year — more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world’s fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit.

At this point, Friedman and I part company. Ever the cheerleader, he advocates tweaking "the system" to "...to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks."

Friedman advances the "magic wand" approach. Slap some solar cells atop the taxi and a bit of nanotechnology in the Hugo Boss suit and all will be well. It won't.

Like most of these dissertations Friedman weighs one problem in isolation of all others. Mankind's consumption of renewable resources has exceeded the planet's ability to replenish them since the mid-80's. We've become dependent on our dwindling aquifers, our emptying oceans and our vanishing forests. Even if well off Americans could break their addiction to overconsumption, less advantaged peoples aren't going to be much better off for it.

Friedman also ignores the chaos that's beginning to arrive as climate change effects settle in. It's very difficult to introduce what would truly be multi-generational reform compressed into a decadal effort just as ecological instability is besetting mankind.

It takes a long time to bring new "sustainable" technologies on line and, even if they were truly sustainable, we haven't got that kind of time. In many parts of the world these new technologies wouldn't be affordable in any case.

And then there's good old human nature. When we give up things it's usually because the artillery has gotten close enough that we can hear the guns firing. Do you sense among your circle of family and friends and co-workers the willingness to voluntarily embrace transformational change and the upheaval that goes with it? I don't see any sign of that.

My guess is that America and China aren't done with their fling yet; that powerful individuals and corporations are looking to the end of the recession/depression in hope they can get back to business as usual, for a little while anyway.

It's taken me some time to accept it but I now firmly believe Lovelock's call for "sustainable retreat." We have to get back into balance with our planet's renewable resources because we have no other choice. The path to that point means fewer and smaller instead of bigger and more. But, above all else, it also means a consensus, a willingness to go back and that's a level of consciousness that I see nowhere on the horizon.

Obama's Wishful Thinking on Afghanistan

President Obama is toying with the idea of reaching out to moderate Taliban factions within the Afghan insurgency, hoping for something akin to the Awakening movement that turned Iraq's Sunni insurgency against al-Qaeda fighters.

In an interview with New York Times reporters, Obama said, "Part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of al-Qaida in Iraq. There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and the Pakistani region."

I think Obama is missing a few points. One is that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq was hardly a bunch of Islamic fundamentalists. They were Iraqi nationalists, Saddam's people.

Another problem is one pointed out by Afghans themselves. From The Guardian

Ashraf Ghani, a former Afghanistan finance minister, who is to stand as presidential candiate in the elections in August, said: "I don't know of a single peace process that has been successfully negotiated from a position of weakness or stalemate."

Ghani is probably right. America's chance to drive a wedge between the Taliban and al Qaeda came and went around 2002-3. Ever since then, Western forces have been driving the two into each others' arms, reinforcing the bond between the Afghan insurgents and their foreign comrades by treating them as one and the same.

Haroun Mir, a political analyst and former adviser to the mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, said that even small-time insurgents would not be persuaded to lay down arms at a time when the Taliban was scenting victory over the Afghan government and its foreign backers. "Reconciliation was a great idea in 2003 or 2004, when the government had the upper hand, but now things are all going the Taliban's way. They are at the edge of Kabul and they have no incentive to join the government's side."

Sorry Barack but you're stuck with the mess created by the astonishing incompetence of the Bush/Cheney regime. At this late stage, America's best option could be to sharply ramp up recruiting, equipping and training of a new Afghan army. Find a location safely removed from the reach of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, establish a major training base for infantry, artillery and armour forces and start churning out trained soldiers four, even five times faster than the experience to date. Begin running classes through officer school and flight schools in the United States.

Somehow the balance of power has to be shifted back to the Afghans. Not the Western forces, the Afghans themselves. If need be, America should even consider subsidizing the Afghan military payroll. Isn't it better to pay a few bucks a month to an Afghan soldier than keep running up the tab in lives and treasure keeping Western forces tied down there?

Hey Iggy, Pull Your Thumb Out!

Dear Mr. Ignatieff. This has nothing to do with Israel Apartheid Week so lower the indignant eyebrow. It does, however, involve Israel and what's left of the Occupied Territories. It also involves your loudly proclaimed zeal for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It involves basic human decency and your chance to show you understand what that is.

From your years in England, you'll be familiar with The Guardian. Get a copy and take a read. You'll find a story about a leaked, confidential EU report that finds Israel is using covert means to effect the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem. In other words, your Igness, they're stealing the homeland of the Palestinian people (the worst kept secret of the last ten years).

In case you can't get your hands on a copy of the paper, here are a few excerpts:

A confidential EU report accuses the Israeli government of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank barrier as a way of "actively pursuing the illegal annexation" of East Jerusalem.

The document says Israel has accelerated its plans for East Jerusalem, and is undermining the Palestinian Authority's credibility and weakening support for peace talks. "Israel's actions in and around Jerusalem constitute one of the most acute challenges to Israeli-Palestinian peace-making," says the document, EU Heads of Mission Report on East Jerusalem.

"Israeli 'facts on the ground' - including new settlements, construction of the barrier, discriminatory housing policies, house demolitions, restrictive permit regime and continued closure of Palestinian institutions - increase Jewish Israeli presence in East Jerusalem, weaken the Palestinian community in the city, impede Palestinian urban development and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank," the report says.

Israel issues fewer than 200 permits a year for Palestinian homes and leaves only 12% of East Jerusalem available for Palestinian residential use. As a result many homes are built without Israeli permits. About 400 houses have been demolished since 2004 and a further 1,000 demolition orders have yet to be carried out, it said.

The EU is particularly concerned about settlements inside the Old City, where there were plans to build a Jewish settlement of 35 housing units in the Muslim quarter, as well as expansion plans for Silwan, just outside the Old City walls.

The goal, it says, is to "create territorial contiguity" between East Jerusalem settlements and the Old City and to "sever" East Jerusalem and its settlement blocks from the West Bank.

Now, esteemed Leader, have you taken a look at the West Bank itself? I mean looking beyond the show ouster of a few dozen illegal settlers. Are you aware that there are 430,000 illegal settlers now taking over the West Bank of the Occupied Territories and that their numbers are increasing by 5% a year (which is why the total shot up 40% during the Bush Era of Darkness)?

Here's a question. Do you think Israel is allowing these nearly half-million Israelis to illegally settle the West Bank if they had any, repeat, any intention of ever handing that land back to the Palestinians? Have you bothered to learn what the occupying force is doing to the West Bank Palestinians in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions?

And here's my final question. Are you a Liberal or are you just a charlatan, a poseur pandering for votes?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/07/israel-palestine-eu-report-jerusalem

MacKay Swings Wildly, Misses Own Shadow

Peter MacKay has joined the "do as I say, not as I do" brigade, telling NATO partners to get more combat troops to Afghanistan on the double as Canada tries to figure out just how we're going to cut and run in 2011.

Pete, when you've announced you're leaving and your boss has told the world we're not going to defeat the enemy in any case, you must come across like more than a bit of a goof when you start talking about victory.

Said Pete: "It's security first. It's combat troops that are needed right now in Afghanistan if we are to succeed." Maybe if Pete's talking about succeeding as in getting our forces the hell out of Afghanistan, he's making some sense. But if he's talking success as in meeting our pledge in our Status of Forces agreement with Kabul to "eliminate" the Taliban and al-Qaeda, he's sounding like a bit of a buffoon.

Pistol Pete took the opportunity to get a swipe in at feckless "coalition" governments. "The future of the alliance is predicated on the notion of all for one. While countries have certain (military) capabilities, some choose to put caveats in place in Afghanistan, some are under constitutional (restrictions) or fall prey to coalition governments which lead to internal unrest. . . . But it still comes down to political will."

So let's get this right. Harper says we're not going to succeed in Afghanistan, that the failed state is in a perpetual insurgency and that the Taliban aren't going to be "eliminated" as we promised. DefMin Pete says we will succeed - if we just get a few more troops.

What a pair of idiots.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/More+NATO+troops+needed+Afghanistan+McKay/1362230/story.html

Hillier Said What?

What does a Canadian victory in Afghanistan look like? Well, according to a Status of Forces agreement between Canada and the Kabul government under the signature of General Rick Hillier, we promised that "Canadian troops will "eliminate" Al Qaeda, the Taliban, "anti-coalition armed groups, and any other insurgents threatening the security and stability of Afghanistan or international peace and security."

So, there we have it. That's where we agreed to set the bar. This is how we will measure victory or defeat for our mission to Afghanistan.

Hillier signed us on to this deal in 2005 during the federal election that brought the shining light of Harperism to power. From the Toronto Star:

A newly elected Harper quickly stamped his support on the mission when he reacted to an upswing in violence in Afghanistan by declaring Canada would not "cut and run" from the country.

"We will not be in any way backtracking from an obligation which has been undertaken," Harper said in a March 2006 news conference.

Less than three years later, Boss Harp had a change of heart - sort of like how he's flopped on everything else such as transparency and accountability for starters - and says we're not so crazy about eliminating the bad guys any more.

But, there it is. That's what our Great Canadian Hero, General "Hubris" Hillier, got us into. That's how you can judge our victory or defeat in Hillier's war.

Sure Hillier got the approval for this from the prime minister but, when you're taking your troops out on the ice, it's the general's responsibility to ensure that ice is thick enough to get his troops safely and successfully to the other side. The guy said it was doable. He told the PM that, he told the same thing to the Canadian people. He was wrong and I don't see any excuse for him not knowing that.

Playing the Global Warming Game - Canadian Rules

When it comes to pointing fingers over carbon emissions, everyone uses the rules that suit them best. America points its finger at China and says that China, now that it has finally exceeded US CO2 emissions, must match America's cuts.

China points its finger back noting, quite fairly, that its population is more than three times larger than America's which makes its per capita emissions just a fraction of America's. Coupled with the fact that most of the current problem is the result of Western industrialization before China's economic miracle, then the US should bring its per capita numbers into line with China's before it lectures anyone else.

They've both got arguable points but what about Canada? Per capita, we're only slightly less carbon dirty than our American neighbours. But maybe there's another way, a Canadian way, of twisting the math.

What if we factor in population density? After all, a nation's landmass represents a major carbon sink. We've got plenty of land and relatively few people. So isn't our landmass soaking up pretty much all the CO2 we few Canadians are emitting?

It suits the Euros to focus on per capita emissions and they're to be commended for it. But Canada isn't Europe. We don't get the environmental economies of scale they achieve by having a lot of people occupying a relatively small territory. It's why mass transit is so much more viable for them than for us. There is sufficient population base to warrant the cost of such expensive infrastructure. On the other hand, Europe's land mass has a limited capacity to soak up their CO2 emissions which means they're inflicting far more greenhouse gas emissions on Mother Earth than their territory is absorbing.

What would the global warming guilt index look like if we played by Canadian Rules which compares greenhouse gas emissions on a square kilometre basis?

Here are some population density numbers, population per square kilometres:

Global average (including Arctic & Antarctica) 45.21

Monaco - 16,754
China - 636
S. Korea - 498
Netherlands - 395
Japan - 339
Belgium - 341
UK - 246
Germany - 232
Italy - 193
France - 106

United States - 31

And Canada? How 'bout just 3? We have three people per square kilometre of our territory. Only three. Less than a tenth of the density of the United States which is, in turn, less than a tenth of the density of Belgium. Our density is just 1/220th of China's.

Now, with just three grubby souls per square kilometre, we also have an enormous Boreal forest that the Euros can't match. We should get credit for that carbon sink too.

So maybe there's the answer. Just ask every other first and second world country to get down to Canada's population density. Three per sq. km., that's it. Oh my, what a different planet that would be.

That said, I remain convinced that Canadians have to pull their full weight in the fight against global warming. The name gives it away, it's "global." Convenient arguments aren't going to get us to a solution. We're all going to take it in the neck although Canada and Siberia will be better off than just about every other place.

I think I'm just a little less interested in self-righteous finger pointing from our Euro friends. There are just too many of them for our own good.

Are Israeli Arabs an Endangered Species?

Benny Netanyahu has described them as a "ticking time bomb" and even moderate forces within the Israeli Knesset don't see a place for Israeli Arabs in the future of their country. In a report from AlterNet, even moderate Kadima leader Tzipi Livni says Israel's Arabs have to go:

Livni told a group of Tel Aviv high school students last December, "and among other things, I will be able to approach the Palestinian residents of Israel, those whom we call Israeli Arabs, and tell them, ' your national solution lies elsewhere.'"

Such talk has consequences.

According to the Israeli Association for Civil Rights, anti-Arab incidents have risen sharply. "Israeli society is reaching new heights of racism that damages freedom of expression and privacy," says Sami Michael, the organization's president.

Among the Association's findings:

* Some 55 percent of Jewish Israelis say that the state should encourage Arab emigration;

* 78 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose including Arab parties in the government;

* 56 percent agree with the statement that "Arabs cannot attain the Jewish level of cultural development";

* 75 percent agree that Arabs are inclined to be violent. Among Arab-Israelis, 54 percent feel the same way about Jews.

* 75 percent of Israeli Jews say they would not live in the same building as Arabs.

The tension between Israeli democracy and the country's Jewish character was the centerpiece of Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu Party's campaign in the recent election. His party increased its Knesset membership from 11 to 15, and is now the third largest party in the parliament.

Lieberman, who lives in a West Bank settlement near Bethlehem, calls for a "loyalty oath" from Arab-Israelis, and for either expelling those who refuse or denying them citizenship rights. During a Knesset debate last March, Lieberman told Arab deputies, "You are only temporarily here. One day we will take care of you."

And this would be the same Israel so unquestioningly and unequivocally supported by Michael Ignatieff and Stephen Harper.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/129853/

The Employment Plunge Continues

The United States lost 697,000 jobs in February, well above the 630,000 forecast by analysts. Of those, 219,000 were manufacturing jobs. Service sector job losses accounted for 359,000 of the new jobless.

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/us-private-sector-shed-697000-jobs-adp-20090305-8on5.html

The Comeback of Karl Marx

Apparently Das Kapital has a new gaggle of admirers - in Britain anyway. According to The Independent, Karl Marx is all the rage in the business sections of British papers, even The Times.

[Marx] might also dispute the idea attributed to him, that slumps make the collapse of capitalism inevitable. Because while he said SLUMPS were inevitable, he also said the outcome wasn't inevitable at all, but depended on whether the poor allow the rich to make them pay for it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mark-steel/mark-steel-so-karl-marx-was-right-after-all-1636864.html

Asper, Pack Up & Leave. Your National Post is Toast!

Shouldn't Lenny Asper be busy trying to salvage something out of the ugly disaster he made of Daddy's CanWest media cabal? Instead he's busy smearing any Canadian with enough conscience and courage to oppose Israeli excesses. Here's Lenny's fetid delerium from the lead editorial in today's National Toast:

...the Tories don't mind smacking down radical groups that spout hate even as they demand multiculti handouts from Ottawa.

Perhaps the best example of this involves the Tamil Tigers (and their Canadian supporters), whom the Liberals never had the courage to brand as terrorists -- that job was left to Stephen Harper. But other examples present themselves as well, such as Mr. Harper's clear support for Israel during the Lebanon and Gaza campaigns, at the United Nations and elsewhere -- even in the face of strident opposition from the Canadian Islamic Congress and other terror apologists.

So, if your view of the Israeli-Palestinian problem doesn't tightly conform to Lenny Asper's, you're a "terror apologist." Once again Loudmouth Lenny proves why Canada will be so much better off without media tyrants of his ilk.

Canadians - We're a Curious Bunch When It Comes to Athabasca

We may be a nation of bobble-heads. Ask us just the right question, the right way, and watch us go.

Last week Ipsos-Reid released a poll that found 64% of Canadians, including 47% of Albertans surveyed, believed that development of the Athabasca Tar Sands should be halted until a clean method of production could be found.

Today there's a Harris-Decima poll claiming that 57% of Canadians, including 70% of Albertans, back the Tar Sands and believe there are more benefits than drawbacks to the venture.

Not everybody was impressed by the Harris-Decima polling. From the Toronto Star:

Mike Hudema, of the environmental watchdog group Greenpeace Canada, said the poll doesn't reflect environmental concerns expressed by Canadians in other surveys.

He said the Harris-Decima questions tend to focus on the oilsands or nothing, and on carbon capture and storage as the sole means to reduce pollution. That, he said, leads to skewed results and empowers political leaders pushing poor ideas.

"It's time our leaders stop deceiving people with false solutions like carbon capture and storage and instead put forward and invest in a green-jobs strategy that will put Canadians back to work building the green economy," he said.

"Unfortunately, both the provincial and the federal governments seem to have their heads too far buried in the tarsands to listen to anything."

Rethinking Afghanistan

An excellent mini-documentary on the quagmire of our own making, the Mission to Afghanistan.



courtesy Brave New Foundation

Okay, Just How Are They Going to Smear Iggy?

Harper was happy to smear Paul Martin, even giddy beyond belief to smear Stephane Dion, but I still don't see how he can possibly risk the blowback of trying to smear Michael Ignatieff.

Harper was able to snipe at Martin and poke sticks into Dion's side from a position where he was pretty much safe from retaliation. There's no longer any safe place where Harper can hide.

Want to look into Ignatieff's past? Good luck with that. It's L'il Stevie who's got the problem with his past now and that he's got in spades.

Harper came into politics literally cloaked in self-righteousness and smug, uber-conservatism. Canada was a northern European welfare state. Kyoto was a socialist plot to steal from the rich. Afghanistan was where we drew the line to defeat Islamist terrorism.

Harper has literally abandoned just about every position he once stood for and promised to uphold. Accountability? Transparency? You name it, he's ditched it. Stephen Harper has turned himself inside out in his quest to cling to power.

Poor old Boss Harp. He's messed himself up so badly that he can't take a swing at Iggy without clobbering himself in the process. Let the games begin.

California Legislators Trash Proposition 8

The Mormons and other homophobes behind California's Proposition 8 intended to ban same sex marriage have run into a legislative wall.

California legislators say the proposition is invalid because it attempts to rewrite the state constitutionl, something within the power only of the legislature itself.

Just days before a historic state Supreme Court hearing on Proposition 8, the Legislature approved a resolution Monday declaring that voters alone did not have the right to adopt the gay-marriage ban.

The nonbinding resolution contends that Proposition 8 – which defines marriage as between only a man and a woman – was an improper revision of the state constitution. Sweeping revisions can only be adopted, the resolution says, if they originate in the Legislature, gain two-thirds approval in that body and then win approval by voters.

The resolution also states that Proposition 8, which voters approved in November, oversteps the authority of the courts to enforce equal protection and prevent government discrimination.

"We're talking about a radical revision to our constitution," said Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, an openly gay member of the Legislature who sponsored the resolution.

"Do we have a constitutional democracy in California," Leno asked, "or do we have mob rule, where a majority of Californians can change the constitution at any time?"

It seems logical enough. Why should a bare majority of a minority of eligible voters be allowed to do what takes a 2/3rds majority in the legislature followed by voter endorsement?

When the question comes before the courts, California's attorney-general will argue that Proposition 8 violates an "inalienable right of liberty" in the state constitution

Wally, It's Time to Charge Those Mounties

Maybe there isn't a winnable case against them for actually killing Robert Dziekanski. It is possible that even manslaughter charges wouldn't stick - possible. But it's becoming increasingly obvious that, in the immediate aftermath of this horribly wrongful homicide, these officers went into full blown coverup mode.

Before the passerby video came out the four mounties gave wildly false statements, claiming that their victim charged them, threatened them with a stapler, even fought them. But for that video they might have gotten away with it.

Surely there's ample basis for charging these guys with obstruction for trying to mislead investigators. Does anyone believe a lay person wouldn't be charged if they tried something like this?

These cops - four of them - highly trained to be skilled observers - either couldn't remember what happened or fabricated an exculpatory deception. They haven't done themselves any favours either by sticking with their excuses at the Braidwood inquiry until confronted with the video and forced to back down.

That these four should be sacked is far beyond question. We don't need cops this honest. But the very idea that they might be handed a severance cheque and allowed to simply walk out the door is unbelievably galling.

Wally Oppal - if you're not prepared to charge any of them for what they did up to the point of Robert Dziekanski's death, you have no excuse for not charging them for everything they did afterward. When it comes to holding mounties accountable, British Columbia doesn't have a great reputation. It's time that changed.

The Coven Gathers Again

The usual mixed bag of warlocks and Druids is gathering again as the Heartland Institute sponsors yet another International Conference on Climate Change. The conference, of course, is not about climate change or the endless flow of scientific research confirming it. It's about folks like Fred Singer getting together to convince each other that there's no such thing as anthropogenic global warming.

The conference is being held in New York for three days beginning this Sunday. Featured speakers include the president of the Czech Republic (assuming he's not needed for begging duties at the EU); the in some circles notorious Richard Lindzen; deep space astrophysicist Willie Soon; Harrison Schmitt; and Nir Shaviv who believes that passages through the Milky Way's spiral arms were the culprits behind Earth's ice ages.

So get ready for it. Assuming the National Toast survives that long, we'll soon be greeted by Lorne Grunter emerging from his cave to pronounce on the scientific consensus that global warming is a myth. Yippee.

No More Acid Trips for RCMP

I hope the Braidwood inquiry recommends that on-duty RCMP officers be strictly forbidden from using LSD. They can't handle it. The hallucinations are simply too dangerous to the public.

That much is clear from the evidence given today by constable Kwesi Millington, the officer who administered five Taser blasts to Robert Dziekanski at an arrivals lounge at Vancouver airport.

In a rare example of quality journalism, the Globe & Mail's Ian Baily captured all the mirth and hilarity that accompanied Kwesi Millington's testimony today:

A bulletproof vest, handgun, baton and pepper spray were not enough to quell the fear RCMP Constable Kwesi Millington says he felt when confronted by Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski during a fatal October 2007 incident at Vancouver airport.

"He had the stapler open, his other fist raised. He was in a combative stance, as we call it, and was approaching the officers, I believe, with the intent to attack so I deployed the taser at that point," he told the Braidwood inquiry into Mr. Dziekanski's death on Monday.

..."Can you tell us how four healthy men from the RCMP could not gain control of him when he's in that position?" commission counsel Art Vertlieb asked.

"I don't know why he was not under control. He was fighting so that's why we had to use [the taser]."

Mr. Vertlieb later asked the officer whether he was "scared."

"Yes," said Constable Millington, who earlier noted that the fact the stapler was open would make it "more" of a threat.

Within moments, Mr. Vertlieb had the constable take the actual stapler in question and hold it to show the inquiry how Mr. Dziekanski brandished it. Constable Millington, 32, stood in the witness box and complied.

The resulting scoffing sounds, snorts of derision and other noises from the spectators' gallery grew so obvious that inquiry head Thomas Braidwood, a former B.C. supreme court justice, had to counsel spectators to cut it out.

Jeebus, this hearing is turning into high comedy. Dziekanski had the stapler opened. Why, surely, he must've chambered a round, eh? Well, eh? What could be more combative than a guy holding a stapler? Who's to say it wasn't a weapon of mass destruction stapler? Maybe it was loaded with curare-tipped staples or maybe anthrax. You can't be too careful, 'specially when you've only got four officers, eh?

Christmas! Even the gallery can't keep a straight face as these mounties, Canada's finest, tiptoe down the path of absolution.

Here's my take. I've had dealings with Tommy Braidwood going back 30-years. I've known the commission counsel Art Vertlieb and the government of Poland's counsel Don Rosenbloom. These cowboys in yellow striped pants don't have a snowball's chance in hell of blowing smoke up any of their backsides. One by one they're just getting themselves in deeper and deeper.

If Harper's boy Elliott has any hope of rehabilitating the RCMP, he'll have to find better officers than these four.

A Picture is Worth - Not Very Much

This is the 12-month stock chart for CanWest Global Communications Corp.




And here's CanWest's 2-year stock chart:

What's that old saying about "buy low, sell high?"

Life Imitates Art, the Real Joe the Plumber

It took me a while to figure out Joe the Plumber and where I'd seen his shtick before:



And Here's Joe's Inspiration